In Babel's Shadow

Language, Philology,
and the Nation in
Nineteenth-Century Germany

TUSKA BENES

•
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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 K R T K

German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies

Liliane Weissberg, Editor

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BENES, TUSKA, 1971-

IN BABEL'S SHADOW: LANGUAGE, PHILOLOGY, AND THE NATION
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY / TUSKA BENES.
P. CM. - (KRITlK: GERMAN LITERARY THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES)
INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.
ISBN 978-0-8143-3304-4 (CLOTH: ALK. PAPER)
I. GERMAN LANGUAGE-19TH CENTURY. 2. GERMAN LANGUAGE-PHILOLOGY.

3. NATIONALISM-GERMANY-HISTORY-I9TH CENTURY 4. INDO-EuROPEAN LANGUAGES-

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To Jane and Peter
 Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xl

Introduction 1

1.
Words Alive! Constructivist Theories of Language
in Late-Enlightenment Prussia 23

2.
Urheimat Asien: German Nationhood and the "Indo-Germanic"
Language Family, 1770-1830 65

3.
Urvolk Germania: Historicizing Language and the Nation
in German Philology, 1806-72 113

4.
Urbild Hellas: Language, Classical Philology, and the
Ancient Greeks, 1806-66 159

vii
 CONTENTS

5.
Comparative Linguistics: Race, Religion,
and Historical Agency, 1830-80 197

6.
Speakers and Subjectivity: Toward a Crisis
of Linguistic Historicism, 1850-1900 241

Conclusion 283

NOTES 297 BIBLIOGRAPHY 361 INDEX 399

viii
 Illustrations

J. G. Hamann 36
Franz Bopp 78
Julius Klaproth 85
Julius Klaproth's linguistic atlas 86
Theodor Bentey 106
Johann Andreas Schmeller 129
J. A. Schmeller's mapping of the Bavarian dialects 133
friedrich Thiersch 183
Georg Curti us 193
August Friedrich Pott 207
August Schleicher's genealogical trees 232
Heymann Steinthal 252

ix
 Ac1mowledgments

A NUMBER OF GRANTS sustained the research for this book, as well as

the writing and revision of chapters. The German Academic Exchange
Service (DAAD) funded my first years in Berlin with an annual grant
and an extension from 1996 to 1998. A fellowship from the Studien-
stiftung des Abgeordnetenhauses von Berlin allowed me to join in
1999-2000 a comprehensive program supporting scholars from the
former Allied countries of the Second World War. The following aca-
demic year the Stiftung Luftbriickendank, established to honor the
American, British, and French pilots who lost their lives airlifting sup-
plies to West Berlin, once again extended my stay. For these generous
opportunities to work and reside in Germany during a period of con-
siderable historical change I am most grateful. Two terms teaching with
the Berlin Program of the University of Washington's Comparative
History of Ideas Program (CHID) likewise helped inscribe Berlin's
libraries and cityscapes more intimately on my memory. In the early
years of graduate school I profited from a Foreign Language and Area
Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, as well as from a Chester Fritz Grant for
International Exchange given by the University of Washington.
Two postdoctoral fellowships allowed me to take leave of the dis-
sertation on which this book is based and to create a substantially
revised manuscript. A Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship in the
Humanities and Social Sciences from 2002 to 2004 gave me two won-
derful years at the University of Pennsylvania. Participating in a Euro-

xi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

pean-American Young Scholars Summer Institute called the "Concept

of Language in the Academic Disciplines," funded by the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, in 2003
and 2004 was equally a treat, first at the National Humanities Center
in North Carolina and then with the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
The tireless energies of the interlibrary loan staff at the College of
William and Mary have meant that finding an academic home and start-
ing a family have been compatible with intellectual productivity.
My intellectual debts far outweigh the aforementioned. Suzanne
L. Marchand and John E. Toews will most readily see their own reflec-
tions in the pages that follow. Inspiring intellects and gentle critics,
both substantially shaped the questions and themes guiding this book.
The following friends, colleagues, and mentors commented generously
on the entirety or sections of the manuscript: Jonathan M. Hess, David
L. Hoyt, Jennifer Jenkins, Sarah Leonard, Jennifer Milligan, Karen
Oslund, Peter K. J. Park, Uta G. Poiger, Sara Pritchard, Sara Pugach,
Jonathan Steinberg, Liliane Weissberg, and George S. Williamson.
Their contributions are invaluable and very much appreciated. Talbot
J. Taylor, John E. Joseph, and the other participants in the "Concept
of Language in the Academic Discourses" summer programs decisively
shaped my understanding of linguistics.
To my family I am the most obliged. Ali Bonyadlou unknowingly
provided the first inspiration for this project, taught me German, made
Berlin my home, and unflinchingly endured my years of itinerancy. Like
any good critic, Parvaneh dismantled draft chapters, parading around
the house with pens and fragments of paper. My parents, Jane Mon-
tague Benes and Peter Benes, provided their scholar-daughter with the
discipline, the example, and the emotional and material support neces-
sary to complete this project. To them this book is dedicated. I take full
responsibility for its faults.

xii
 Introduction

I n 1843 the young French theology student Ernest Renan (1823-92)

found himself "strangely fascinated" by what he termed the "peculiar
spirit of Germany": he had just begun reading works in German philol-
ogy that "astonished" him. For two years the aspiring scholar of He-
brew devoured volumes dedicated to the critical, historical exegesis of
biblical texts. This "initiation to German studies" was enthralling, but
it placed Renan in a difficult position. Philology, he claimed, "ruin[ ed]
the edifice of absolute truth" that his Catholic superiors invested in
scripture. The revealed word of God seemed incommensurate with a
cri tical reading of the Bible. 1 This realization propelled the would-be
priest into a deep spiritual crisis. On October 6, 1845, Renan refused
the tonsure, left the confines of the Saint-Suplice seminary, and em-
barked on a secular career as a philologist. His later reflections on The
Future of Science (1848) credited German philology with awakening
the "spirit of modernity." "The founders of the modern spirit are
philologists," Renan ventured. "The day philology perishes, criticism
will perish with her; barbarism will be born again, and the credulous
\ViII be masters of the world.,,2
Uninitiated readers might assume the philologist "only works with
words." "What could be more frivolous?" Renan declared. 3 "Many may
be tempted to laugh" on seeing how seriously the philologist "expli-

I
 INTRODUCTION
cates grammatical idiosyncrasies, gathers commentaries, and compares
editions of ancient authors" known only for their "caprice and medi-
ocrity.,,4 Renan defended his German authors from "the terrible accu-
sation of pedantry.,,5 Philology, he insisted, was more than "simple eru-
dite curiosity." It was "an exact science of the human spirit.,,6 "The true
philologist, Renan asserted, was "at once linguist, historian, archaeolo-
gist, artist, philosopher.... Philology is not an end in itself. Its value is
as a necessary condition for the history of the human spirit.,,7 Language
study lay at the heart of humanistic inquiry for Renan; the history and
forms oflanguage had a significance beyond their mere utility in the in-
terpretation of texts.
In the nineteenth century, the field of philology encompassed var-
ied forms of biblical criticism, art history, archaeology, and literary, cul-
tural, and historical analysis, as well as the formal study of ancient lan-
guages and grammar. These pursuits were united by a critical-historical
reading of texts and by an assembly of technical methods forged by Ital-
ian humanists in the early modern period. 8 Knowledge oflanguage, in-
cluding grammar and etymology, was key to the philological enterprise,
both as a requisite for textual criticism and as a study in its own right.
Comparative and historical analysis of Semitic tongues, for example, fu-
eled Renan's criticism of the Bible. In 1848 he advanced a controver-
sial thesis regarding the origins of monotheism. The rigid structure of
Hebrew roots had supposedly curtailed the mythological imagination
of its early speakers, suggesting to Hebrews the existence of a one and
only God. For Renan, as for many of his contemporaries, each national
tongue provided insight into the cultural and intellectual proclivities of
its speakers. The history of languages likewise revealed the origins and
ethnic affiliations of their speakers, transporting scholars to the most
distant moments of the past.
Renan's grand ambitions suggest why the field of philology capti-
vated the nineteenth century. Lectures on the science of language at-
tracted large popular audiences in cities such as London, and philology
intrigued some of the period's brightest minds. 9 Renan's remarks like-
wise recall Germany's prominence in the field. "Almost all the material
work in philology is sustained ... by Germans," he noted in 1857. "The
true excellence of Germany is in the interpretation of the past .
. . . Philology ... is her creation .... The service rendered by Germany
is to have elevated an organized science to new heights ... and to have
given philosophical meaning to a pursuit once imagined as a simple ex-

2
 INTRODUCTION

ercise in curiosity."IO If Renan's faith in the language sciences was in-

tlated, his debt to German precedents was real. German-speaking Eu-
rope was arguably the center of philology in the nineteenth century; II
ti'otn Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and Jacob Grimm (1785-
1863) to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913), philologists trained at German universities were influen-
tial, internationally renowned scholars.
The particular field of comparative-historical philology is the cen-
ter of gravity around which this study draws together related German
scholarship on language. At midcentury comparative philology distin-
guished itself from culturally and historically based textual analysis as
,r.;prachwissenschajt (the science of language) or Linguistik (linguistics),
.1lthough scholars of language were closely affiliated with various na-
tional philologies, especially Indology, through the Weimar Republic. 12
Born of the Oriental Renaissance, comparative philology prided itself
on the ability to order the world's diverse tongues and peoples in ge-
nealogical formations. Its notable achievements include the massive
grammars and dictionaries, mind-boggling in their detail and scope,
that still dot library shelves. (Not atypical is Franz Bopp's 550-page
Comparative Grammar ojthe Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian,
Gothic, German, and Slavonic Languages, published in six parts from
1833 to 1852.) Comparative philologists were masters of little-known
and often scarcely documented languages. Their concern was the his-
torical reconstruction of tongues and the search for a lost, primordial
Indo- European Ursprache. 13 Far from obscure, such research carried
cultural weight, with implications for theology, philosophy, the pursuit
of prehistory, and notions of nationhood and ethnicity. Especially
among students of Semitic tongues and New Testament Greek, com-
parative research on language and the historicization of once sacred id-
ioms was never far removed from highly controversial forms of biblical
criticism. As Maurice Olender has shown, comparative philology at-
tended closely to questions of race and religious identity, seeking in the
distant past alternative models of Christianity, while distinguishing the
supposed contributions "Aryans" and "Semites" made to European
cUlture. 14
The emergence of comparative philology as a field coincided with
the upsurge of nationalist sentiment that spread across German-speak-
ing lands from Kongisberg to Konstanz following Napoleon's defeat of
the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. For this reason, the passion with

3
 INTRODUCTION

which philology was practiced in Germany, especially within the fields

of Germanics and Oriental studies, has also often been tied to national
concerns.!5 Language scholars inspired over a century of historicist for-
ays into the Ur-forms of German national culture and set a tradition of
defining the nation according to three competing points of presumed
origin in India, the Nordic lands, and classical Greece. Problems of na-
tionhood closely intersected with the religious concerns of comparative
philologists. As George Williamson has argued, research into the Ger-
man national past was always framed within a narrative that engaged
traditional Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish self-understanding.!!>
In contrast to fields such as anthropology or psychology, the his-
tory of linguistics has received remarkably little attention outside disci-
plinary circles. l ? This is surprising given the undeniable impact language
study has had on the modern period. Language scholars contributed to
the rise of European nationalism and the emergence of nineteenth -cen-
tury notions of race and ethnicity. Comparative philology intervened in
debates over the interpretation of scripture; it also contributed to the
formation of academic disciplines and to the methodologies of human-
istic inquiry. These are the chosen contexts of reception for this study.
The entwinement of language scholarship in discussions of nationhood,
religion, and the production of knowledge and culture is not coinciden-
tal. A German tradition of reflecting on the autonomous powers of lan-
guage or the way words actively mold the human experience attributed
to language almost mystical powers of creation. Nineteenth-century
philologists imagined national tongues shaping communities and cul-
tural practices, as well as the thought patterns and identities of those
who spoke them.
The first aim of this study is to consider why language became a
powerful and enduring metaphor for the representation of national cul-
ture in Germany. Germany represents the quintessential case of lan-
guage study contributing to the rise of modern nationalism.!N From the
Napoleonic invasions until the founding of the German Empire in
1871, German speakers often asserted the right to national self-defini-
tion on linguistic, not political or territorial, grounds.!9 When Ernst
Moritz Arndt demanded in 1813, "Where is the German's fatherland?"
his reply echoed those of other nationalists: "Wherever is heard the
German tongue, And German hymns to God are sung!" University
professors and academics were key public figures in the Restoration and
Vormdrz. And language was an important venue in which they defined

4
--- INTRODUCTION

German nationhood. 2u As Benedict Anderson has noted, professional

hilologists were "incendiaries" in the nationalist movements of central
~urope. Their grammars and dictionaries produced new awareness of
the European vernaculars, enabling speakers and readers to assert the
unique value of their language and nation. 21
Languages have not always marked national boundaries, however.
There \vere no uniform spoken national tongues before the onset of
general primary education. Nonliterate vernaculars provided only a
weak basis for communal identification, language falling often sec-
ondary to and in conflict with other criteria for distinguishing group
membership. In the late eighteenth century a small cultural elite had to
invent the idea of a standardized national tongue and popularize the
right to national self-determination on linguistic grounds. 22 Actual lin-
guists have reconstructed processes oflanguage standardization that al-
lowed local idioms to claim the status of national tongues. 2 ., Compila-
tions by Andreas Gardt and Claus Ahlzweig document the emergence
of a "mother-tongue ideology" or a national linguistic consciousness
among German-speakers. 24 Similarly, Michael Townson has sketched
the political functions of language in Germany as a symbol and instru-
ment of national solidarity and a creator of political realities. 2 ; This
study establishes the intellectual foundations for defining the German
nation as a linguistic community.
The second goal of the study is to contextualize the importance
oflinguistics to modern cultural studies. Specifically, it puts into histor-
ical perspective what has become known as the "linguistic turn" in
today's social sciences and humanities. This term usually refers to an
early-twentieth-century rejection of traditional notions of language, in
which words were a transparent medium for the expression of ideas and
emotions or for the description of an external world. As Martin Jay has
argued, this rejection coincided with a new appreciation of the episte-
mological significance of language. In interwar England, for example,
Ludwig Wittgenstein began to regard language as a social practice, sug-
gesting that the meaning of words was determined by use and perfor-
ll1ative function. French philosophers, by contrast, explored a supposed
deeper level of structural regularities that constituted language as an
unintended and arbitrary system of diacritical signs. Structuralists and
POststructuralists, including Michel Foucault (1926-84), claimed lan-
guage to be an autonomous system that both conditioned and enabled
the assertion of human subjectivity.26 These scholars rejected the ideal-

5
 INTRODUCTION

ist assumption that concepts and identities originated in the activity of

a sovereign consciousness. Rather, after the "linguistic turn," subjects
themselves appeared to be constituted by linguistic infrastructures not
readily accessible to the mind. The ramifications of this were consider-
able, shaking the foundations of carefully laid systems in a manner that
recalls Renan's disillusionment with theological orthodoxy.
The shape of the linguistic turn in Germany depended, as Jay sug-
gests, on a Protestant tradition of biblical exegesis. In his view, German
scholars were most concerned with hermeneutics, the interpreting,
translating, and explaining of texts. Jay rightly notes the early modern
roots of German hermeneutics and its close ties to the Reformation.
Protestant exegetes assumed that divine revelation came through
speech, and the sacramental character of speech continued to inform
later hermeneutic theory. In the twentieth century, German critical the-
orists, for example, including Jiirgen Habermas, practiced an antino-
mian hermeneutics of suspicion and demystification, hoping to unmask
ideology in language. 27 Jay's focus on meaning and hermeneutics, how-
ever, overlooks the rich, nineteenth-century tradition of comparative
philology and the historical study of language itsdfin Germany.28 It is
here that the roots can be found of the characteristically French, post-
structuralist attempt to deconstruct subjectivity based on a view of au-
tonomous language.
My contention is that the centrality oflanguage to the contempo-
rary human sciences dates to the late Enlightenment. Language began
to assume what the East Prussian Pietist J. G. Hamann termed "ge-
nealogical priority" in all questions of the mind during the last decades
of the eighteenth century. I argue that this transformation occurred in
a two-part process. On the one hand, the theory of signs presented by
the French philosophe Etienne Bonnot de Condillac in 1746 gradually
historicized language as the subjective expression of particular human
communities. This move disrupted the representational function oflan-
guage by detaching words from their ultimate reference points in pre-
viously existing physical or metaphysical realities. Language ceased to
mirror universal rational forms, appearing instead as a contingent prod-
uct of its own internal principles or of a national spirit. On the other
hand, the German theologians J. G. Hamann and J. G. Herder evoked
language in an influential critique of Kantian metaphysics during the
1790s. Their efforts, especially as continued among the followers of
Wilhelm von Humboldt, set a tradition of pitting language against the

6
 INTRODUCTION

claims of rationalism and the transcendental subject. Friedrich Nietz-

sche and Ferdinand de Saussure should, for this reason, not be seen as
the autochthonous founders of a radically postmodern movement. As
this study indicates, their interventions followed and engaged a century
of philological reflection on the constructive powers of language.
Why was language such a potent object of analysis for nineteenth-
century German intellectuals? The institutional context of the university
is one consideration. The humanist reforms of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries made training in language a mainstay of the European
universities and a sine qua non for the human sciences. Of the seven lib-
eral arts, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic are concerned with the struc-
ture and use of language. The humanist curriculum subjected students
to extensive linguistic drilling, as well as to arduous training in grammar
and formal rhetoric. The fluency thus gained in a foreign language and
literature was thought to bestow the skills necessary to become a model
member of the community. Eloquence bred civic virtue and moral indi-
viduals by recalling the example of classical antiquity. As Anthony
Gratton and Lisa Jardine have shown, grammarians did far more than
relay formal rules of grammar and syntax. They introduced students to
t<)feign cultures and presented them with a classical ideal of aesthetic
and moral development. 29
By the late eighteenth century, philology had established itself as
the t1agship discipline that set the standards of professionalism and sci-
ence (Wissenschaft) that defined the modern research university. 3D As the
ttllll1ding of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1810 testi-
fies' philological seminars were the first to embrace research as their
calling. A training ground for university and gymnasium teachers,
philology attracted students in numbers comparable to those in theol-
ogy and law. Its chief representatives, including the classicists Christian
Gottlob Heyne, Friedrich August Wolf, and August Boeckh, were
harbingers of a tradition of historicist thought, textual interpretation,
and hermeneutic theory that sustained the cultural sciences through
the late nineteenth century.31 Classical studies, in particular, offered the
German bourgeoisie a choice venue for social self-definition, bestowing
through education or Bildung the rights to state service and cultural
leadership.
Within the European tradition language had also long been a
l11edium for reflecting on questions of epistemology and theology.
Since antiquity language had been evaluated for its effectiveness in dis-

7
 INTRODUCTION

closing truths of various kinds. Plato's Cratylus, for example, asserted

that names were tools or instruments of instruction, regardless of
whether they had a natural or conventional relationship to the objects
they represented. This dialogue considered whether etymology could
shed light on the correctness of ideas by tracing them back to a myth-
ical name giver. According to the Hebrew Bible, a thorough under-
standing of language could further one's knowledge of the physical
world; the names Adam gave to Eve and the animals in the Garden of
Eden maintained an essential bond to the things they represented. The
mystical tradition of the Kabala likewise invested metaphysical and
magical significance in the structures of the Hebrew language, the let-
ters of the alphabet both constituting and embodying a divine order.'2
Language study could also prove destabilizing and provoke anxi-
ety about the certainty of truths it purported to uphold. A perceived
crisis of linguistic representation plagued the seventeenth -century heirs
to the rhetorical culture of Renaissance humanism. As Quentin Skinner
has argued, the art of persuasive speech and its ability to sway listeners
threatened moral ambiguity; eloquence could transform the reality of
vice into apparent virtue. For John Locke and John Wilkens, language
was likewise fallible. But it was also the tool best equipped to ensure
stable meanings and a reliable correspondence offacts and definitions ..n
Locke, for example, assumed that speakers developed ideas indepen-
dent
y of language; but he feared the confusion that arose when an in-
dividual arbitrarily selected linguistic signs to stand for ideas in the
mind. 34 Thomas Hobbes, for this reason, proposed that the fiat of the
sovereign should regulate meanings and definitions.'s This perspective
on language corresponded with a concern for the viability of the new
discursive communities that grew up around the European vernaculars.
Individual languages were expected to facilitate the exchange of ideas
among all who mastered the standardized forms of national tongues
and partook in the institutions of print culture and the public sphere.
Seventeenth-century natural philosophers likewise searched for a
universal system of representation, a mathematical language capable of
depicting accurately the laws of a divinely authored universe. As Robert
Markley has shown, the Christian tradition contrasted God's ineffable
word with the fallen languages of humankind. War, religious sectarian-
ism, and political instability exacerbated anxieties about conventional
language on the eve of the scientific revolution; experimental philoso-
phy also revealed a supposed rupture between theological absolutes and

8
- INTRODUCTION

a corrupt material world. The universal language schemes of the 1640s

to 1680s attempted to "reverse Babel" by removing representation
ti.oJ11 history. If the fall into national tongues had marked a descent into
sin and political instability, restoring the transparency of an ideal lan-
~l1agc could re~~i~ the damage done by human pres~mption ..36 .
Biblical CritiCism proved to be the most contentious applicatIOn of
philology in Europe from Renaissance times on. Analysis of rhetoric en-
;lb1cd Christian humanists, such as Desiderius Erasmus, to isolate uni-
vcrsally valid theological teachings from culturally specific injunctions. 37
The historicization of sacred languages could also undermine orthodox
rcadings of scripture. Sixteenth-century philologists interpreted the
biblical text as a historical document and the product of specific cul-
tural and social conditions. Old Testament exegetes tended to be Pro-
tCssors of Hebrew or "Oriental" languages, such as Aramaic, Syriac,
Arabic, or Ethiopian. In contrast to classicists, they did not adopt a for-
malist approach to language. Biblical scholars bound the meaning of
words to cultural practice and regarded textual production as a social
behavior. At first this transpired without secularizing scripture or ques-
tioning the mystical and miraculous. 38 But philology raised the problem
of how God's word is transmitted to a fallen world. Was God's freedom
of expression limited by the expressive possibilities of historical speak-
ers in the first through third century?
By the end of the eighteenth century, philology had decisively
weakened the bond between the Bible and theology. As Jonathan Shee-
han has argued, Enlightenment philologists separated revelation or the
word of God from the Old and New Testaments as texts. Historical
criticism transformed the Bible into a local and temporal artifact, sub-
ject to degeneration and corruption, while God's word remained eter-
nal. As this happened, the "Enlightenment Bible" assumed new mean-
ing and authority as a cultural document. 39 By the nineteenth century
thc continued amalgamation of culture and religion placed theological
dehates within national frameworks. Christianity, for example, increas-
ingly appeared as an expression of German culture, one that rejected its
Jewish origins and repudiated contemporary Jews as culturally dis-
tinct. 40 Nineteenth-century philologists provided the material and tools
necessary to unravel theological orthodoxies, entering heated debates
On the relationship between theology and national heritage until the
eve of World War 1.

9
 INTRODUCTION

German philologists put particular emphasis on problems of ori-

gin and historical development when considering language. Their his-
toricization of national tongues thus contributed to what John E.
Toews terms the emergence of the historical principle as a dominant
cultural form in the early nineteenth century.41 Comparative philologists
generally interpreted language as evidence of ethnic descent and wove
myths of cultural origin around the perceived starting points of national
tongues. The first moments in the emergence of a language or nation
were considered to be formative; the organic unfolding of a first princi-
pie or underlying idea could explain subsequent historical development.
This origin paradigm held sway over German linguistic thought
through most of the nineteenth century. By contrast, French language
scholars embraced a model of nationhood based on the idea of a discur-
sive community, an open assembly of speakers united by shared patterns
of communication and exchange. In revolutionary France, for example,
knowledge of the mother tongue was thought necessary for citizens to
participate in legal institutions, sustain a democratic government, and
foster French literature and culture. 42
In this respect, comparative philology epitomized the nineteenth-
century German quest for origins. Language scholars worked feverishly
to reconstruct the Ursprache, or the primordial linguistic forms from
which the world's tongues supposedly evolved, especially within the
Indo-European language family. Philologists ordered languages and
ethnic groups based on the model of branching genealogy from a sin-
gle point of origin. 43 "Family tree" figures were unusually prominent in
German linguistics and the German social sciences generally. A stepped
staircase or "scale of civilization," by contrast, in which successive
forms progress through standardized evolutionary stages, dominated
British social anthropology in the 1860s and 1870s. 44
The concern for origins can partly be explained by the central role
language played in German considerations of culture, community, and
cognition. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, language is deeply embeo-
ded in the quintessential myth of origins, as well as in the most endur-
ing account of the history of nations. In the beginning was the Word,
according to the Gospel of John. The God of Genesis supposedly cre-
ated earth and the heavens through a performative act of speech.
Adam's first act in the Garden of Eden was to name the animals of cre-
ation and his female companion. The Pentateuch likewise defines the
tribes that descended from Noah's three sons by tracing the genealogy

10
 INTRODUCTION

of their national tongues!S German philologists, in this sense, worked

in the shadow of Babel, searching for primordial tongues with a view
to biblical accounts of their significance.
The importance comparative philology assigned to origins had
tWO contradictory implications for German intellectual circles-one
conservative, one critical. The discipline walked a fine line between two
tendencies: affirming the exemplary aesthetic and moral value of past
epochs, and conjuring powerful weapons of historical criticism. On the
one hand, philology idealized distant moments in the past as models for
German cultural rebirth. This sustained a quasi-religious longing for
the salvation promised by providential history. A focus on formative
foundations anchored what were often messianic narratives of fall and
redcmption. 46 The primeval past was likened to a Golden Age; the naive
innocence of youth enjoyed a moment of purity and respite before suc-
cumbing to an inevitable process of cultural degeneration. The
prospect of return encouraged nationalists to model the imagined com-
munity on memories of archaic cultural essences. Origins could also
provide a sense of epistemological security. Ur-forms otTered a stabiliz-
ing locus of meaning and identity, an idealized moment of nostalgia
that otTset the otherwise unsettling effects of historical relativism. 47
On the other hand, genealogy and the search for origins could
disrupt established historical narratives and rob ethical claims of their
universal validity. Renan's crisis of faith afflicted many who chose
philology over theology in the nineteenth century. Comparative philol-
ogy threatened to confront language scholars and other humanists with
the implications of extreme historical and cultural relativism. Exposing
the origins of metaphysical concepts, for example, could, as Friedrich
Nietzsche argued, fatally unmask the contingent, nonbinding founda-
tions of theology and ethics. German philology tended to affirm the
notion that chance linguistic conventions shaped communities and
their thought patterns independently of human desire or self-reflection.
As such, a penchant for tracking origins and Ur-forms strengthened the
power and perceived autonomy with which language molded the
human experience. By contrast, examining distinct stages in the life of
a language might have drawn attention to the synchronic dynamics of
speech and communication and reinforced a discursive model of lin-
guistic community. It might likewise have endowed individual speakers
with greater authority to direct their usc oflanguagc through conscious
acts of communication and representation.

11
 INTRODUCTION

There was a tension in nineteenth-century German historicism,

Toews has shown, between the perception that human identity was
constituted by inherited patterns and an ethical ambition to forge new
political and cultural communities in the present: R Linguists took vari-
ous positions on whether speakers could consciously alter the au-
tonomous inner laws regulating language change and on the degree to
which external historical factors conditioned the evolution oflanguage.
Yet the prevalence of the origin paradigm tended to foreground the his-
torically determined and ethnic nature of linguistic communities, while
limiting the supposed ability of speaking subjects to express or even ex-
perience a sovereign consciousness outside of a national linguistic
framework. This linguistic determinism transferred to historical
tongues some of the autonomy and agency that other concepts of lan-
guage reserved for human subjects. German comparativists conjured a
vision in which national tongues could be independent, living beings
endowed with their own internal principles of growth. The self-suffi-
cient, inner laws governing the linguistic organism drew the act of rep-
resentation away from the conscious intention of speakers. It also de-
tached words from stable reference points in the external or
metaphysical world. How the concept oflinguistic agency that resulted
from these transformations shaped ideas of nationhood and influenced
the linguistic turn in twentieth-century continental philosophy is the
subject of this study.

LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL GENEALOGY

The story of Genesis opened the possibility of using language to trace

national genealogies. Following the flood, the descendents of Noah's
three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, formed tribes speaking distinct
tongues, and their division was often regarded as the first source of na-
tional and linguistic diversity. Long before the nineteenth century, Ger-
man speakers defined their communities through language and history.
During the Renaissance, for example, philologists applied their techni-
cal skills to craft fallacious myths of origin. The cities and states of fif-
teenth-century Europe felt the need for a primordial past that rivaled
the ancient histories of Greece and Rome. Philologists thus forged
"historical" texts that linked the biblical Middle East, Troy, and the
peoples of northern Europe. One early-modern U'J'Eeschichte curiously
claimed that Friesland was founded by three Indian gentlemen, Friso,
Saxo, and Bruno, who traveled west to study with Plato and fight for

12
 INTRODUCTION

Philip and Alexander of Macedon. Finally settling in Frisia, they drove

away the aboriginal giants, all while speaking Sanskrit:9
Martin Luther's 1534 translation of the Bible helped standardize
written High German and raised new expectations for the study of lan-
guage in Germany. On the one hand, the philological act of translating
scripture into the vernacular appeared to bring German readers closer
to the divine truth of God's word. Luther's text extended to Protes-
tants a more intimate relationship to God; it also suggested that the
truest form of Christianity was a German cultural achievement. 5o Later
generations likewise believed that translation could improve upon an
original text by better explicating hidden or intended meanings. Thus,
the early Romantics declared German speakers to have a proclivity for
translation, being uniquely capable of interpreting and mediating the
cultural patrimony of other nations. On the other hand, Luther's Bible
gained symbolic weight as a foundational moment in the emergence of
the German nation. Nineteenth-century scholars cited Luther as the
bearer of a national language and literature. A masterpiece of philology
supposedly created the language that united Germans; in Luther's tra-
dition, German national culture was enriched and expanded through
work on language. 51
The experience of the Thirty Years War (1618-48) also attuned
German intellectuals to the national cultural significance of language.
Central Europe suffered devastation during this conflict, and the solid-
ification of a German vernacular lagged behind other European idioms.
Not surprisingly, baroque philologists, such as Justus Georg Schottelius
(1612-76), equated the restoration of German culture, even German
political authority, with establishing the mother tongue as a viable
medium for literature and scholarship. As Markus Hundt has sug-
gested, seventeenth-century language scholarship aimed to correct a
perceived deficit in the development of German culture when com-
pared to France, Italy, and Spain.52 Schottelius's drama FriedensSieg
(1642), for example, which was often performed after the Peace of
Westphalia, bemoaned the intrusion of foreign words into the German
language. Ancient German heroes returning to aid a seventeenth-cen-
tury soldier found themselves unable to understand his corrupt idiom.
For Schottelius, cultivating the German language was the only way to
restore cultural and moral integrity to a war-torn land."
Philologists and poets carried the German patriotic movement of
the seventeenth century, especially in Protestant areas. The perceived in-

13
 INTRODUCTION

stability of the German vernacular made for a situation in which speak-

ers felt compelled to make claims about its heritage and significance.
New societies, such as the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617), aimed
to perfect the German language as a medium of artistic and literary ex-
pression. And asserting its practical, political, and poetic value over Latin
required technical research. Lexicographers and grammarians, such as
Christian Gucintz (1592-1650), consciously began constructing a stan-
dardized written tongue, contributing, as did Hieronymus Freyer
(1675-1747) and Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen (1625-
76), to the development of New High German. S4 Schottelius himself
published Ausfiihrliche Arbeit von der teutschen Haubt Sprache (1663),
as well as a grammar and commentaries on the supposedly depraved
state of his mother tongue. These texts no longer treated German as the
"maid of Latin," an aid for learning classical tongues, but insisted on its
value for the nation. After Christian Thomasius defiantly announced his
intention to hold lectures in German in Leipzig in 1687, this type of
Kulturpatriotismus found a home in Germany's unusually high density
of universities and attracted mobile members of the intellectual elite. ss
Reference to the origins and great antiquity of the German lan-
guage was in this period an important mechanism for legitimating its
social and literary application. Schottelius countered the prevalent view
that German was a relatively new language by tracing its genealogy to
Babel. He proclaimed German to be the oldest Ursprache of the Celtic
tongues, being at least three thousand years of age and of no relation
to Greek or Latin. 50 According to Schottelius, German was a direct de-
scendent of the Adamic language and as such had a divine character. 57
He stressed the affinities between German and Hebrew, then consid-
ered of dosest relation to the divine language of revelation;5R others,
such as Leibniz, declared German itself most proximate to God's word.
Privileging German over the holy and classical languages had since
the early modern period likewise been a means of undermining tradi-
tional forms of cultural authority. Philology could challenge, as well as
stabilize, ruling elites. German humanists and church reformers turned
the vernacular against the dictates of Rome. In the late eighteenth cen-
tury, the emerging German middle class cultivated a standardized writ-
ten idiom in literary and academic discourse as the basis for a new pub-
lic sphere that challenged aristocratic and court culture. The numerous
reading groups, patriotic societies, and literary journals that gave birth

14
 INTRODUCTION

to modern civil society depended on written High German as a unify-

ing bond. 50 Until the mid-nineteenth century, members of the Bild-
1tlllfsln'i1;gertttm (the educated middle class) in Germany relied on uni-
\'e;sitv training, rather than on economic or political achievement, for
social' recognition, so academic publications, scholarship, and literature
were chief vehicles for class self-definition. Devotion to the vernacular
enabled German intellectuals to define a public sphere of middle-class
activity independent of the Standestaat (corporative state) and to nur-
tun: a small but burgeoning national community. Benedict Anderson's
notion that the emergence of print culture enabled disparate popula-
tions to imagine themselves as a community partaking in a collective
t~lte holds true for German speakers, perhaps more so than for more
homogeneous linguistic groups.
The political history of modern central Europe presented few al-
ternatives to a linguistic conception of community. In contrast to states
with a long tradition of central monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation lacked compelling institutions that might have
united its many principalities and free cities; German speakers had no
dominant urban center and few natural geographic boundaries. For
most of the nineteenth century, Prince Klemens von Metternich's loose
contederation of thirty-nine German states served only to buttress the
political order of the old regime and silence nationalist or revolution-
ary torces. Until German unification in 1871, central Europe remained
fragmented into tiny principalities that could not sustain a political vi-
sion of nationalism. Austria and Prussia, the two largest German terri-
tories and the most promising candidates for unification, were multi-
ethnic states containing significant Polish-, French-, Danish-, and
Czech-speaking minorities. Sizable German-speaking populations were
also scattered across eastern Europe and Russia and could not readily
be included in either a grofl- or kieindeutsch political solution.
A particular concept of language emerged within this German
context, one that favored the historically specific over the universal. At
the most basic level, German comparativists held words and grammat-
ical structures to be historical testaments to the communities that spoke
them. The history of a language and its geographical expansion from a
point of origin revealed the heritage of its speakers and their ethnic de-
scent. Many philologists assumed that etymology could uncover how
prehistoric peoples had lived, thought, and worshiped. Language
SdlOlars attributed peculiarities in a nation's religious practices or intel-

15
 INTRODUCTION

lectual achievements to the thought patterns and worldviews produced

by certain grammatical structures and vocabulary. The inner principle
of growth attributed to each national tongue supposedly exerted a for-
mative influence on its speakers, guiding their collective consciousness
and communal life.
Another series of relationships drew together language, culture,
and nationhood outside of Germany. Language scholars in France and
Britain continued to embrace the tradition of general grammar well
into the 1830s. According to this tradition, shared grammatical princi-
ples expressing universal laws of rationality lay hidden in the diversity of
national tongues. Words spoke not to cultural particularities of their
speakers, but to divinely inspired structures that permeated the mind
and the empirical world. Scholars outside of Germany also retained
greater concern for the contributions that individual speakers made to
the evolution of national tongues. for Locke and others, language was
an instrument of communication and sociability, one that bowed to the
whims and intentions of its users. Imagining language as a system of
signs set by consensus and convention tended to reinforce the agency
and free will of speakers, and it drew attention to static language states
rather than genealogical development.
German philologists made language study central to a historical
definition of national culture and to an ethnographic project of estab-
lishing the genealogical relations among the world's peoples. In so
doing, comparative philology built upon and altered the largely biblical
and Christian terms by which cultural difference had previously been
defined. New mechanisms for classifYing languages and tracing their
early histories raised the expectation of scientifically "correcting" the
Pentateuch. German scholars reworked the tale of Babel into a histori-
cal explanation for the emergence of cultural diversity, applying secular-
ized biblical narratives of cultural degeneration and salvation to a new
history of nations.
This attempt to rewrite Babel produced three new national ge-
nealogies in German-speaking lands. Orientalists proposed that the first
Germans hailed from a primordial homeland in India or central Asia.
Scholars with theological concerns, often Catholics, generally favored
this vision, wishing to uncover the origins of Christianity in a culture
that predated Hebrew antiquity. Some Germanists suggested that mod-
ern German likely descended from Gothic speakers in the north. Their
model of nationhood stood in opposition to the reactionary policies of

16
-- INTRODUCTION

local German princes ~~d t.ended to a~vocate a Protestant, northern

German solution to U~lhcatlon. Both views ch~lleng~d the neohuman-
ism of classicists who situated the cultural startmg pomt of the German
nation in ancient Greece.
The "tyranny of Greece over Germany" has been well docu-
mented in nineteenth-century German literature and aesthetic tastes,
and at the start of the nineteenth century the Hellenic model of Ger-
man nationhood commanded the greatest degree of cultural influence
and credibility. The institutional strength of classical philology and the
prominence of neohumanism in the schools upheld the supposedly uni-
versal aesthetic of classical antiquity as the preferred source for German
self-styling."" Yet the humanist predilection for an idealized Greek aes-
thetic increasingly came under fire from Orientalists and Germanists
who gave greater cultural authority to perceived lines of historical and
ethnic descent.
Historians have often tied the German penchant for defining na-
tionhood through language and descent to an expansionist and exclu-
sionary vision of community. In this view, early nineteenth-century
thinkers, such as J. G. Herder, provided fodder for a radical volkisch na-
tionalism in the Wilhelmine period, with language serving as evidence
of racial identity.61 Others have claimed that the early conflation oflan-
guage and race in German nationhood sustained a special path of de-
velopment leading to the Third Reich. According to Leon Poliakov and
George Mosse, the violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi period found its
inspiration in the distinction language scholars drew between Semitic
and Indo-European tongues. 62 While comparative philology was an im-
portant venue for the German invention of race, reducing the field to
a precursor of National Socialism or, as Edward Said has implied, to the
handmaiden of imperial expansion, ignores its complexities. As Thomas
Trautmann has shown for British India, Aryan theory has had varying
functions and cultural implications over time, including the marking of
kinship between Britons and Indians. Europeans looked to an Aryan
past to answer questions of religious, national, and political identity.
These were specific to a nineteenth-century context, and religion was
otten a more pressing concern than race in the search for German ori-
gins.""'
German statehood came from above in 1871 through blood,
Iron, and the Realpolitik of Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck
(1815-98). Hardly inspired by the force of a common cultural patri-

17
 INTRODUCTION

mony, unification represented the triumph of new state structures,

rather than the victory of popular, emancipatory nationalism.'" Merely
the largest of the German principalities, Prussia asserted its dominion
over lesser states, adopting the rhetoric of nationalists who once sought
liberal political reforms. Given the strength of other loyalties and iden-
tities, the Empire held limited appeal for the majority of its inhabi-
tants. 6 ' And Bismarck largely rejected an ethnocultural definition for
the Kaiserreich, initially protecting the status of linguistic minorities
and resisting the type of eastward imperial expansion that his successors
envisioned.
Nevertheless, the notion that Germany existed as a linguistic com-
munity or Kulturnation exercised a recurrent appeal, especially among
a new brand of Wilhelmine nationalists. A far more popular conflation
of language and race after 1890 justified the imperial and Pan-Ger-
manic aspirations of powerful patriotic sucieties. 66 Their representatives
heralded Fichte, Grimm, and other comparative philologists as evi-
dence of a long-standing German tradition. Hellenic, Orientalist, and
Germanic models of German nationhood likewise existed side by side
through the mid-twentieth century. Historical novels, such as Gustav
Freytag's Die Ahnen) and Richard Wagner's operas fixed in the popu-
lar imagination notions of German speakers' cultural origins that had
been introduced over a century earlier."? Nineteenth-century philolo-
gists set the terms of a discourse whose relevance only increased as their
exclusive control of it ceded to more dominant cultural figures within
the newly established nation-state. Language did not create a German
nation, but middle-class intellectuals did imagine the ideal forms it
should take. The tale philologists told of a pure linguistic community
that had primordial roots in Asia and the Germanic past influenced how
political leaders, educators, artists, and authors defined the nation until
the ultimate perversion of these ideas in the Aryan theory and Ger-
manophilia of the Third Reich.

THE RISE OF AUTONOMOUS LANGUAGE

If one tangent of this study leads toward Nazi Germany, the other
resurfaces in postwar France. In 1966 the French philosopher Michel
Foucault attributed pride of place to philology in his controversial his-
tory of the human sciences. While remaining on the "fringes of our his-
torical awareness," he claimed in The Order of Tbings: An Archaeology
of the Human Sciences) philology modified the modern manner of

18
- INTRODUCTION

knowing "at the deepest level of its archaeological organization.,,68 The

work outlined the discursive formations that since the sixteenth century
had guided the production of knowledge in the fields oflabor, life, and
language. According to Foucault, comparative philologists, such as
Franz Bopp, Friedrich Schlegel, and Jacob Grimm, were major intellec-
tual figures whose impact had yet to be recognized. Their historiciza-
tion oflanguage around the year 1800 destroyed, in his view, the illu-
sieHl that words were transparent media of representation and
communication.69 Philology, in Foucault's interpretation, depicted na-
tional tongues as having an independent principle of inner develop-
ment. And this life force actively shaped how speakers thought. Nine-
teenth-century observers wished speech to be their servant, he
suggested, yet slowly realized that they expressed their ideas in words
of which they were not the masters. 70 For Foucault, this foretold the
"end of man." "Man is in the process of perishing," he concluded, "as
the being oflanguage continues to shine ever brighter upon our hori-
zon.,,71 The historically determined structures of language set the pos-
sibilities for the very articulation of human subjectivity.
Foucault's history served a philosophical agenda. A major figure
in the "linguistic turn" of twentieth-century continental philosophy,
roucault presented in The Order of Things a genealogy of the concept
of language underlying his own understanding of how discourse con-
stitutes modern subjects. Comparative philology, he implied, decisively
influenced the turn to language within modern thought. "It is clear
that this 'return' of language is not a sudden interruption in our cul-
ture"; he asserted, "it is not the irruptive discovery of some long-
buried evidence .... It is, in fact, the strict unfolding of Western cul-
ture in accordance with the necessity it imposed upon itself at the
beginning of the nineteenth century.,,72 Foucault lay claim to compar-
ative philology as one of his own formative points of origin.
This study seeks to make more precise Foucault's claim that com-
parative philology developed the concept of language that sustained
poststructuralist thought. It traces the rise of "autonomous" language
from the late eighteenth century through Friedrich Nietzsche, one of
the figures who most influenced Foucault. As Foucault suggests, com-
parative philologists began to imagine language as an independent
force existing beyond the conscious control of speaking subjects. They
depicted language as a system blindly obeying impersonal phonological
rules at the expense of human values and experience. 73 This conception

19
 INTRODUCTION

of language fueled an escalating crisis of subjectivity that culminated in

Nietzsche's reducing the knowing subject to an illusion of grammar. In
this way, linguistic analysis has rivaled psychology and historicism in its
penchant for destabilizing the coherent, knowing subject supposedly
exalted within the humanist tradition." Twentieth-century observers
questioned the ability of the subject to declare itself independent of the
external conditions of its own possibility, whether those be linguistic,
rooted in the body, or in historical and cultural contingencies.
Starting in the 1760s and 1770s, well before the turning point
Foucault cited, two related theories of language gradually endowed
words with the autonomous power to shape culture, community, and
cognition. What Charles Taylor has termed an exprcJJivc theory of lan-
guage came to replace a predominantly representative view oflanguage.
Words were thought to reveal more about the subjective character and
spirit of their speakers than about the objects they represented. 7s The
late-eighteenth century also witnessed the emergence of what Lia
Formigari labels constructivist theories of language.?!> National tongues,
in this view, cease to be passive instruments of thought, communica-
tion, and representation. Rather, they actively contribute to the way
human subjects experience the world, engage in intersubjective rela-
tionships, and conceive of their own identities and cultural practices.
The autonomy that characterized language in both these concep-
tions derived from a profound shift in its presumed points of reference.
The historicity of national tongues prevented both a natural and a
purely conventional bond between a word and its referent. Words no
longer marked stable structures that existed prior to the intervention of
human observers or remained unchanged by their representation in
language. An expressive theory of language assumed that national
tongues referred to the subjective spirit of those who spoke them; an
irreducible spiritual force motivated the act of linguistic signification.
This endowed national languages with ethnological significance and el-
evated words themselves to sites of cultural memory. Conversely, con-
structivist theories held that language referenced nothing more than its
own inner principles of organization and growth. Speakers were captive
to the self-regulating systems of signification whose vast internal
labyrinths determined what could be said, thought, and experienced at
a given moment in time.
Linguistic historians have debated which figures and intellectual
traditions are most responsible for historicizing language and thus

20
 INTRODUCTION

binding it to questions of nationhood and cognition, and the battle

lines fall in stubborn formations. A French camp led by Hans Aarsleff
argues that the universalist tradition of general grammar, especially as
intluenced by Etienne de Condillac, coupled questions oflanguage and
the mind. In this view, both Wilhelm von Humboldt and Saussure ex-
panded a late eighteenth-century concern for the role sign systems
played in representation, reviving interest in how the mind distin-
guished linguistic elements to create meaning. 77 Germanists mustered
by Konrad Koerner insist on the philosophical sensitivity of German
language scholars. J. G. Herder and Humboldt translated their respect
t()r cultural particularism into a theory of linguistic relativity and lin-
guistic determinism. Considerations of Kant's transcendental philoso-
phy, moreover, and the introduction of psychological principles to lin-
guistics maintained a consistent German concern for the relationship
between language and the mind. 7R
While acknowledging French precedents, this study highlights the
German and especially the theological context to the rise of au-
tonomous language. The French Enlightenment was a major source of
German ideas about nationhood. German philologists, however, en-
hanced the expressive and constructivist functions of language as these
were suggested by Condillac. Radical Pietists and liberal Protestants in
Germany recalled the performative function language assumed in the
Old Testament, endowing the "living word" with creative powers in a
tallen world. God's word had brought into existence the earth and the
firmament, according to Genesis. In the Gospel of John, the word of
God acquired the life necessary to infuse a fallen world with divine
truth. At the start of the nineteenth century, comparative philologists
took the Promethean step of historicizing the world's tongues. Lan-
guage ceased to be a gift of God. Yet in an ironic twist of fate, the cre-
ative powers of God's word survived to animate national tongues, while
drawing the shadow of Babel over the autonomy of speaking subjects.
The poststructuralist concern for language bears the mark of a distinc-
tively religious paper trail; the modern critique of subjectivity echoes an
earlier fall of man.

21
 1
Words Alivel
Constructivist Theories of Language
in Late-Enlightenment Prussia

I n the winter of 1801-2, the Prussian nobleman Wilhelm von Hum-

boldt (1767-1835) hastened to jot down some reflections on the
Basque language. He had just returned to his Tegel estates after an ex-
pedition through the Spanish Pyrenees, and an ambitious intellectual
project was brewing in his mind. The unpublished fragment evolved
into a plan for transforming the study of language into "its own, sys-
tematically ordered subject, one distinct from all othcrs." What a "rich,
grand, and profitable" exercise it would be to compare "the diverse lan-
guages of ancient and present times." The young Humboldt elaborated
his vision in the prophetic tones of a recent convert. Researchers would
compile a "systematic encyclopedia" that arranged the world's tongues
according to the degree of their linguistic affinity. This was hardly a
novel proposal, as Humboldt himself recognized. Comparative philol-
ogists had taken steps in this direction, but he had a heightened sense
of the historical and philosophical rewards such a project would reap.
Humboldt held language to be "the imprint of a people's ideas" and
their "collective spiritual energy." Documenting the historical relations
among languages would therefore elucidate the "character" of the na-
tions that spoke them, as well as their "past fate." It would also enable
a "metaphysical analysis" of how the peculiarities of each national
tongue stood in relation to the universal human capacity for thought. I

23
 CHAPTER 1

Reasoned reflection, Humboldt had long suspected, was not possible

without language. 2 Philologists who charted the "landscape of all pos-
sible linguistic variety" could thus glean insight into the inner workings
of the human mind. 3
These words fell at the end of Humboldt's six year quest for an
intellectual vocation. Recent stays among the German Romantics in
Jena and the disciples of Etienne de Condillac in Paris had convinced
him that "absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as
its language." While in Spain, the future Prussian statesman resolved to
devote himself "more exclusively to the study of language" and to a
"philosophically based comparison" of different national tongues. 4
Basque was an inspirational starting point because the language devi-
ated so dramatically from its European neighbors. Humboldt hoped to
discover whether the Iberian natives were indeed "a distinct tribe" and
to "c1assity them correctly ... in the genealogical table of all nations.,,5
The topic departed markedly from previous forays into ancient Greece.
As a student of the noted philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne, Hum-
boldt had been trained in a canon of literary and aesthetic Hellenism.
Now he insisted that the "raw and barbaric" languages many contem-
poraries dismissed as "wild" merited serious intellectual attention. 6
Within a year, he began perusing the grammars of Native American
tongues that his brother, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, had
brought back to Europe. To these he later added Sanskrit, Hebrew,
Farsi, Chinese, and the southeast Asian language Kawi.
Diplomatic responsibilities and service to the Prussian state pre-
vented Wilhelm von Humboldt from devoting himself fully to philol-
ogy. But his conception of the language sciences falls at an important
juncture in the history of the discipline. Humboldt possessed the cul-
tural foresight and political acumen necessary to launch comparative
philology on its distinguished nineteenth-century career. This chapter
reconstructs the intellectual pillars upon which comparative philology
and philosophical reflection on language rested in nineteenth-century
Germany. As Humboldt's remarks suggest, considerations of nation-
hood, cultural identity, epistemology, and language were closely related
in the late eighteenth century. Exploring the epistemological concerns
of the period is thus an important prerequisite for situating both the
linguistic definition of German nationhood and the renewal of philo-
sophical interest in language that occurred in Germany after 1850. The
chapter distills a tradition of reflecting on the supposedly autonomous

24
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

powers with which words and grammatical structures molded human

subjects. Et10rts to explain how historical tongues shaped nations and
various forms of thought endowed language with a life and will of its
own that gradually encroached on the perceived ability of speaking sub-
jects to hold and express ideas independently of inherited linguistic
trameworks.
The specter of autonomous language first arose in the French En-
lightenment. An increasingly historical appreciation of the evolution of
national tongues led late-Enlightenment observers to question the
transparency with which language represented and communicated
ideas. For this reason this chapter starts by sketching a gradual transfor-
mation in eighteenth-century conceptions of the epistemological sig-
nitIcance attributed to language study. The creative powers of language
acquired new depth and dimension, however, in the work of two East
Prussian theologians: Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) and his disci-
ple Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Their Pietist Protestant
background breathed life into a word that an earlier tradition still
deemed a perfectible instrument of a person's rational control. It was
in their hands that language evolved from being a pliable tool to an ac-
tive and unwieldy subject in its own right. The "living word" embod-
ied the creative power of an immanent God; it was also inspired by the
collective souls of linguistic communities.
The late eighteenth-century German concern for the relationship
between language and nationhood arose in the context of the political
and religious debates surrounding Enlightenment absolutism and the
Francophone culture of the Prussian court. Hamann and Herder
turned against the universalist project of Aufklarung that Frederick the
Great cultivated among rationalist elites interested in its utility at the
level of the state. For Enlightenment scholars, the existence of uniform
rational structures-outside of language-implied that a set of univer-
sal rules governed politics and the ideal state. The pair favored an alter-
native model of community that stressed the organic, historical growth
of unique national communities founded upon the Volksgeist, as well as
the formative power with which language imbued native speakers.
Hamann and Herder's insistence on the extent language molded
the understanding brought them into conflict with the transcendental
philosophy ofImmanuel Kant (1724-1804) in the 1780s. This chapter
also follows how the constructivist powers attributed to words evolved
in response to German idealism. A late-Enlightenment attempt to fac-

25
 CHAPTER 1

tor language into Kant's theory of the mind introduced many of the
philosophical concerns for language that have characterized the twen-
tieth century.7 Wilhelm von Humboldt was a key transitional figure
whose posthumous legacy bridged these two periods. The construc-
tivist aspects of his linguistic philosophy have their roots in the empiri-
cal tradition of French theorists, but also in the Sprachkritik that Ger-
man scholars launched against Kant's metaphysical edifice.

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION

FROM LOCKE TO CONDILLAC

The novelty of late eighteenth-century associations of language and

thought can best be appreciated with a brief retrospective. Only grad-
ually did European thinkers come to regard language as a constructive
force, even if it had factored prominently in earlier discussions of epis-
temology. The parameters for discussing the role of language in cogni-
tion during the Enlightenment were set by two theorists in the closing
decades of the seventeenth century: the Englishman John Locke
(1632-1704) and the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-
1716). Representatives of competing empiricist and rationalist tradi-
tions, both sought a basis for certainty in knowledge by perfecting the
ability of words to convey ideas and facilitate thought. Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1689) introduced the notion that
language could be a potentially transparent tool of communication and
cognition, and the question of how to enhance knowledge by perfect-
ing language resurfaced throughout the eighteenth century in the form
of critical responses to this text. The ultimate goal of making language
transparent to its representations, of rectifYing its deficiencies and lift-
ing the opaqueness with which it signified an external or subjective re-
ality, remained at the core oflanguage theory until the 1770s, although
perceptions of the difficulties facing speakers in this matter led to a
growing appreciation of the power words held over the human mind.
Unlike their eighteenth-century followers, neither Locke nor
Leibniz viewed language as having a constitutive role in the acquisition
of knowledge. For both, the ultimate possibility of words becoming ef-
fective vehicles of thought lay in the supposition that ideas existed prior
to language and that the human mind, whether reacting to sense im-
pressions or innate ideas, acquired knowledge on a prelinguistic level. 8
Thus, in Locke's view, "simple ideas of sensation," derived from the
empirical world, and "simple ideas of reflection," based on the mind's

26
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

processing of them, both existed first in prelinguistic form as a mental

sign of a thing, and only at a second level of abstraction were they as-
signed words that became signs of the ideas. 9 For Leibniz, words like-
. .
wise functlone d mere Iy as " sI'IpS or tok " " mark ers "h
ens, t at "mIrror
. [d]
e
d
the understan mg.· ,,10 H h h ' I d
e, owever, soug t a ratlona or er, some-"
thing divine and eternal" in the multiplicity of national tongues and en-
visioned compiling a perfect artificial language that reduced reasoning
to numerical calculation. 11
Within this framework, Locke in particular emphasized the free
will and agency of the speaker. For him language did not entail an ab-
stract, external system or a preexisting set of rules that governed com-
munication and might be thought of as evolving independently of
human action. Rather, it consisted in the voluntary acts of individual
speakers. Locke prioritized what Talbot Taylor terms the "semiotic
agency" of the subject in the way he conceived the relationship be-
[\veen word and idea. 12 The speaker, Locke insisted, had the "inviolable
liberty" to "make Words stand for what Ideas he pleases." This connec-
tion was not guided by an a priori correspondence between word and
idea, but was something the individual forged. Specifically, Locke stip-
ulated that the linguistic process of signification was arbitrary, volun-
tary, private, and individual. Neither language nor society could impose
meaning on the free will of the speaker: "no one hath the Power to
make others have the same Ideas in their Minds, that he has, when they
use the same Words, that he does. ,,13 This situation was not entirely
bendicial; it led to miscommunication and confusion. This was for
Locke the main obstacle and source of error in the development of
human understanding, and he suggested to later theorists that it would
be possible to reason and use language more effectively if one inquired
into the origins and evolution of signifYing practices.
While there are indications that Leibniz at times questioned the
arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign, the classical empirical tradition
extending from John Locke is more directly responsible than the ratio-
nalists for assigning autonomous power to words.14 The notions that
linguistic signs had a constitutive role in the acquisition of knowledge
and that historical fluctuations in the store of words available to the
human mind affected the possibilities for cognition contributed in the
eighteenth century to a new appreciation of the constructivist function
of language. As an afterthought to his Essay Concerning Human Un-
derstanding, Locke proposed a "doctrine of signs" that evaluated "the

27
 CHAPTER 1

signs the Mind makes use of ... and the right ordering of them for its
clearer Information. ,,15 His suggestion that signs played an inescapable
role in cognition inspired later eighteenth-century theorists to make
semiotics the foundation of epistemology.lo In another widely read pas-
sage, Locke speculated that the complex vocabulary of any given na-
tional tongue developed as a metaphorical expansion from an original
core of names for simple ideas of sensation. By implication, the growth
of national vocabularies over time could be interpreted as an expansion
in the store of ideas available to their respective cultural eommunities. 17
Etienne de Condillac (1715-80) translated Locke's observations
into a more rigorous analysis of how the historical growth of language
influenced the progress of knowledge, as well as the formation of na-
tions and their worldviews. The epistemological significance he and the
French ideologues placed on the evolution of particular sign systems
has led many to herald his work as the "source" of modern notions
concerning the linguistic relativity of cognition, including claims that
each national tongue generates its own worldview and accepted forms
ofknowledge. IB Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Understand-
ing (1746) did tie progress in knowledge to the historical development
of language, thereby eliminating Locke's lingering rationalistic faith in
humankind's a priori capacity for thought. 19 The linguistic sign, in his
view, was not a supplementary instrument created to communicate
thoughts that existed prior to language; rather, it had a constitutive role
in cognition, "the use of signs" being "the principle which unfolds all
our ideas. ,,20 Classical empiricism assigned an active role to language in
the cognitive process and for this reason has rightly been considered
one the forerunners in a constructivist theory of language. 21
Specifically, Condillac's Essay sought to explain how individual na-
tional tongues evolved historically from what he considered to be an
original language of gesture. Children abandoned on a desert island
would have relied on nature, he believed, to draw from them the first
cries and gestures. Physical responses to certain sensations, desires, and
passions, and "accidental signs" that brought to mind objects based on
contextual association, were both, according to Condillac, involuntary
products of environmental stimuli and physiological determination.
Only in a second stage of development did speakers themselves invent
the type of linguistic sign that "insensibly enlarged and improved the
operations of the mind.,,22 "Institutional" or "artificial" signs evolved
under the voluntary control of human beings and allowed them to en-

28
- CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

gage in willful cognit~ve activity. For Condillac,. all signs. e~tablished

connections between Ideas. Yet humans only gamed semIotIC agency
once the historical development of language made them "masters" of
their own attention and enabled the mind to "dispose of itself, draw
ideas which it owes only to itself." Without institutional signs the mind
was "ruled by its environment," subject to the accidental and natural
associations the material world established between ideas.23
Different patterns of signification produced for Condillac the lin-
guistic diversity found across nations. While claiming that individual
sign systems were "arbitrary," he also opened the possibility that lan-
guages developed their own "character." Specifically, Condillac won-
dered whether it was not "natural for each nation to combine its ideas
according to its particular genius. ,,24 Discrepancies in the interests,
needs, and circumstances of individual linguistic groups resulted in
their processing sense impressions and associating ideas in a different
manner. A preexisting feeling or sensibility characteristic of a commu-
nitv resulted in each national tongue developing its own unique "genie
de 'la langue. ,,25 Condillac stressed that "each language expresses the
character of the people who speak it"; the "genius of a language" re-
tlected certain "passions" that a multitude could not conceal. National
character was, however, not determined by language. It was a factor of
two conditions: climate and government. 26 More pressing than the re-
ciprocal relationship between language and nationhood was for Condil-
lac whether linguistic peculiarities hindered or advanced progress in the
arts and sciences. 27
Condillac's notion that a group's language helped determine how
its members think represents a reversal of the mentalist foundations of
language proposed by Locke and Lcibniz, in which linguistic expres-
sion is determined by an innate thought structure. Yet he stopped far
short of assigning fully autonomous powers to language by maintain-
ing the bonds between words and nature. In the Essay, arbitrariness ap-
pears to be the dominant feature of the institutional signs invented by
l11an. But here, as in his later work, Condillac questioned the com-
pletely arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign, insisting that words were
artificial but not lacking an intrinsic connection to their incorporeal
ideas. 2M Like Locke, he maintained that "the most abstract terms" de-
veloped on the basis of natural analogical principles from "the first
names that were given to sensible objects. ,,29 Metaphors provided the
means of making the transition from primitive sounds to an expanding

29
 CHAPTER 1

store of linguistic signs. Condillac, in other words, preserved a univer-

sal foundation for cognition in the physical nature of human sensation.
The linguistic sign retained an intrinsic metaphorical meaning derived
from the empirical world. And a language could become a perfect con-
duit tor understanding if speakers took care to develop it analogically
and without flaws from the original language of nature.~o Words re-
mained perfectible instruments in the hands of sovereign subjects until
a more fully historicist theory of language made knowledge and sign
systems relative to particular human communities.

J. D. MICHAELIS AND THE "OPINIONS OF PEOPLES"

Cundillac's understanding of language in relation to nationhood en-

tered Germany under the auspices of the Francophone court of Fred-
erick the Great. In 1746 the Prussian sovereign appointed Pierre- Louis
Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), one of Condillac's closest fol-
lowers, president of the newly revitalized Academy of Sciences and
Belles-Lettres. The reception of Maupertuis's and, by extension, Con-
dillac's linguistic thought among many nascent German intellectuals
was thus colored by its associations with absolute monarchy, Enlight-
enment rationalism, and French cultural hegemony. Adherents of the
Enlightenment project, including the rationalist theologian Johann
David Michaelis, welcomed both the cultural and political implications
ofCondillac's conception oflanguage. His Pietist critics, J. G. Hamann
and J. G. Herder, engaged fully with the questions raised by French lin-
guistic thought, but their epistemological rcsistance to Condillac and
Michaelis reveals a distinct agenda centered on the articulation of Ger-
man difference and the advancement of an alternative notion of politi-
cal community.
At stake was the question of how to reconcile Enlightenment faith
in universal reason with the apparent diversity of national tongues. In
the French tradition, sign systems were historically contingent and
therefore arbitrary. Yet, by virtue of this very fact, the process of lin-
guistic signification could be perfected. Individuals could amend spe-
cific instances of language use so that words corresponded more di-
rectly to preexisting rational structures. Hamann and Herder ascribed
greater autonomy to national tongues, believing that speakers lacked a
prelinguistic foundation for evaluating truth and accuracy. For them,
the diversity of languages implied an extreme form of cultural rela-
tivism. Political institutions should be a natural outgrowth of a nation's

30
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

inner spirit, just like its language, literature, laws, and mythology. In
their view, the Prussian state slavishly followed the dictates of France,
and ahsolutist rule threatened to eliminate uniquely German traditions.
Frederick the Great's vision of the enlightened state, as well as his
disdain for German language and literature, shaped the Academy of
Sciences that welcomed Maupertius. As his essay "On German Litera-
ture" (1780) suggests, the Prussian king feared his "native" tongue
lacked the clarity, polish, purity, and taste necessary to be an effective
vehicle of culture. Accordingly, he designed the academy to serve as
"the official mouthpiece of French philosophy in Germany.,,3l Its mem-
bership was predominantly foreign; publications and plenary sessions
were held in French. Frederick, moreover, used the institution to assert
his authority as an enlightened philosopher-king. The academy made
manifest notions of the hierarchical relationships linking power, knowl-
edge, and obligation that were typical of Prussian absolutism. 32 Mau-
pertuis was a willing servant, styling himself as the enlightened despot
of the academy and helping maintain the Enlightenment credentials of
the king:13
Within this context, Maupertuis investigated how the diverse sign
systems of national languages influenced the respective forms of peo-
ples' thought. Like many in the eighteenth century, he was concerned
with the relative cultural achievements of different human communities
and suggested in his Reflections on the Origin of Languages and the Sig-
nification of Words (1748) that a comparison of the languages "to
which each nation is accustomed" and their "fixing of signs ... in this
or that manner" might shed light on the way the "first human beings"
developed their knowledge. His "Dissertation on the different means
employed by men to express their ideas," read to the academy on May
13, 1756, urged German scholars to conduct empirical research on the
epistemological nexus between national tongues and cognition. 34 At his
behest one year later, the speculative-philological class of the academy
hosted the first of its famous essay competitions on the topic "What is
the reciprocal influence of the opinions of a people on the language and
of language on opinions?,,35
The academy competition dwelt primarily on the problem of how
a comparison of national tongues could highlight defects that made lan-
guage less effective as an instrument of cognition. 36 Participants were
advised to consider based on examples how "the particular opinions
held by the peoples" influenced the "many forms and bizarre expres-

31
 CHAPTER I

sions there are in languages." The successful response would also show
how the preponderance of certain idioms and root words could be
"sources of particular errors or the obstacles to the acceptance of par-
ticular truths." The goal of the essay was then to conclude generally
how a "language in turn gives to the mind a more or less favorable in-
clination towards true ideas" so that "one could explore the most prac-
ticable means to remedy the short-comings of languages. ,,37 Reflection
on language was to provide solutions to philosophical problems. 38 But
the formulation of the question also suggests that the usefulness of par-
ticular sign systems could be evaluated against standards of truth that
existed outside of language. Condillac himself expected the history of
language to "uncover philosophical errors ... at their causes" so that
he might "prescribe a simple and easy procedure to attain certain
knowledge" of the metaphysical world.'w
The G6ttingen theologian and Orientalist Johann David
Michaelis (1717-91) submitted the winning essay. His Dissertation on
the InjluCrtce of Opinions on Language, and of Language on Opinions
(1759) explored what contributed to the relative "perfection, or imper-
fection of the languages of certain nations," situating their particular
characteristics in relation to the "degrees of genius, understanding, and
knowledge" that could be achieved by these peoples:o Michaelis took
an anecdotal approach to the question, first citing cases where the in-
fluence of a people's opinions had impacted language. According to the
biblical philologist, language had all the benefits and perils of a
"democracy" where "use or custom is the supreme law." Nobody con-
trolled the "immense heap of truths and errors of which the languages
ofthe nations are the repositories," so the ideas of scholarly authorities
often mixed with the knowledge of ordinary people. 4l This need not be
disadvantageous. For example, the persistence of local names for plants
among speakers of dialect could assist the learned botanist in his classi-
fications. The remainder of the essay outlined those attributes that con-
tributed to the relative "richness or poverty of a language." Michaelis
showed how a "copiousness of terms and fecundity of etymologies and
expressions" could further the advance of science by "preventing many
errors and altercations about words. ,,42 Equivocation, on the other
hand, spread the "kind of mist" that prevented a name from being
"fully expressive of its object. ,,4.1
The expectation of advancing knowledge by perfecting language
suggests the extent that Michaelis believed words could be tools of an

32
- CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

u nderstanding that transcended nationality. The biblical philologist

built his career interpreting the Old Testament as a historical product
of the ancient nation of Israel. According to Jonathan Hess, he hoped
to "de-Orientalize" contemporary Christianity by excerpting univer-
sallY valid elements of the faith from what was otherwise a culturally
spc~jfic product of the Hebrews. 44 The Dissertation is filled with exam-
ples of how the truths of divine revelation could be purged from the
historical and social context in which scripture was written by identifY-
ing how nationally specific aspects of biblical languages might have al-
te~ed the message of God. 45 Michaelis cautioned that some exegetes
had perpetuated mistakes found in scripture because they falsely as-
sumed that "the Hebrew people had never spoke a word but was in-
spired, or [that] the prophets writing in that language, had not been
obliged to make use of popular expressions." His Dissertation sug-
gested how the study of historical languages could rectifY the literalness
of such interpretations and remind readers just how alien the ancient
world of the Hebrews had been. 46
Michaelis likely suggested to Johann Gottfried Herder that lan-
guages were "an accumulation of the wisdom and genius of nations. ,,47
The Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767), in which Herder
tirst explored the relationship between national languages and cogni-
tion, opened as a critique of Michaelis's assumption that reason was
prior to and essentially independent of language. Earlier, the same as-
sumption solicited disapproval from a fellow Orientalist, Johann Georg
Hamann, who objected more generally to the understanding of lan-
guage that the biblical philologist applied to the interpretation of scrip-
tun::. Until this time, the goal of Enlightenment semiotics remained
that of the doctrine of signs proposed by John Locke: to perfect lan-
guage as a vehicle of communication and to reach an unequivocal un-
derstanding of words that might help foster the acquisition of knowl-
edge. As will be seen, the new understanding of linguistic signification
introduced by Hamann and Herder more thoroughly rooted words in
the subjective consciousness of the historical subject and made human
beings, not nature, the ultimate source of meaning and representation.
Their notion that language was first and foremost the creative expres-
sion of a people's inner spirit brought an end to eighteenth-century at-
tempts to reform language as a tool for enhancing and transmitting
knowledge. Language study, as Hamann and Herder understood it, did
not light the path to truth. Rather, it "carr[ied] a torch to the dark re-

33
 CHAPTER 1

cesses of the human soul,,48 and illuminated the conditions under which
the very standards for evaluating knowledge were constructed.

THE "LIVING WORD" OF J. G. HAMANN

The two theologians who came to stand as patrons of the German na-
tionalist movement both rejected the Enlightenment project of Freder-
ick the Great, as well as the related religious assumptions behind
Michaelis's view of language. In the 1760s and 1770s, J. G. Hamann
and J. G. Herder reconceived the relationship between individual lan-
guages, reason, and national culture based on the supposed role of "the
word" in God's revelation to man. Responding to Michaelis's Disserta-
tion, the pair declared nationality to be the result of linguistic diversity.
They dismissed his instrumentalist view that language was a perfectible
instrument under a person's rational control. Words, in their view, were
not pliable tools, but active and autonomous subjects that helped forge
culture and community. Hamann and Herder imagined national
tongues to be living beings with their own laws of historical develop-
ment. Languages embodied the creative power of God's word and sup-
ported more meaningful communities than those modeled on the En-
lightened rational state. Reason, Hamann and Herder insisted, was the
variable product of contingent linguistic structures, so too should be
the political life of the nation.
Frederick the Great and his coterie of French philosophers were
among the chief targets of Hamann's attack on the Berlin Enlighten-
ment. 49 This animosity had both personal and intellectual roots.
Hamann spent twenty years of his life employed as a clerk in the king's
General Excise and Customs Administration, a government bureau
adapted from French models. Charged with translating documents
from French to German, he resented the foreign taxation practices as a
constant reminder of German cultural subservience. In his polemic "To
the Solomon of Prussia" (1772), Hamann demanded the king rid his
realm of the foreigners who dominated the academy and recognize the
genius of native sons. Like Solomon, Frederick was guilty of whoring
after foreign gods, and Hamann urged him to break with his rationalis-
tic favorites at the court. 50 For Hamann, an Enlightenment-rationalistic
view of language corresponded with an overly abstract and disembod-
ied notion of community.
Hamann's own theory of language emerged as fragments in re-
views published in the Crusades of a Philologist (1761). Several of these
34
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

reproached J. D. Michaelis with the passion of religious conviction.

The animosity of the rhetoric likely stems from the differing responses
each scholar had to the rationalist reforms of Enlightenment Prussia, as
well as from the proximity of their intellectual projects as Orientalists
and biblical exegetes. Both men had been born into Pietist strongholds
and experienced a radical version of German Lutheranism that stressed
the depth and sincerity of personal faith, inward reflection, and direct
union with an immanent God. Michaelis had gained critical distance
tram the intellectual climate of his native Halle while abroad in Eng-
land in 1741 and came to reject the notion that supernatural grace was
working in human life. As professor for Oriental languages at the Uni-
versity of Gottingen, he favored a rationalist interpretation of scripture,
denying the miraculous nature of Christian writings and the notion that
the Holy Spirit guided exegesis of biblical texts. 51 Hebrew, Michaelis
held, was a natural tongue that had to be read with the strict standards
of philological criticism and interpreted based on its place within the
larger Semitic language family. His rationalistic philosophy of language
meshed well with the ambitious of the Francophile Berlin academy and
its patron, Frederick the Great, but was a thorn in the side of their self-
proclaimed enemy, the "Magus of the North."
Young Hamann's own attempts to find a niche in the Franco-
Prussian cultural establishment had failed despite his early entrance into
Konigsberg's rising bourgeoisie. His father had been a surgeon-barber
who had advanced in his career far enough to become the supervisor of
a municipal bathhouse. Following a rather undistinguished tenure at
the local university, Johann Georg had joined the household of rich
Baltic merchants in Riga as the tutor to the ambitious Berens family.
Hamann himself journeyed to London in 1758 to conduct secret ne-
gotiations on behalf of the family. But the departure from East Prussia
resulted in his returning to his family's Pietist roots. For ten months
Hamann reveled in raucous London living, an indulgence that pro-
pelled him into a prolonged spiritual crisis and depression. In debt and
devastated to have discovered that his host had accepted money for il-
licit sexual favors, Hamann fled to a cheap boarding house to repent his
sins. He found solace in reading the Bible from cover to cover. The
transmitted word of God in scripture offered Hamann salvation and
converted him to a mystical form of German Protestantism that pro-
toundly shaped his appreciation of the power of language.
The particular object of dispute between Hamann and Michaelis

35
 The portrait J. G. Hamann left to his parents upon leaving K6nigsberg to
serve the Cunily or Baroness von Budberg in 1752. The informal checkered
scarf covered the hair loss he suffered following a childhood illness; in public
settings Hamann preferred a wig. From Volkmar Hansen, ed. Johann Geot:.fJ
Hal1'lam'l, 1730-1788 (Diisseldorf: Goethe Museum, 2001).
(Courtesy Goethe Museum DUsseldorf)
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

was the relationship of Old Testament Hebrew to Arabic and other

"Oriental" tongues. Michaelis was the biblical philologist who had ad-
v,lIKed the critical-historical interpretation of scripture by demonstrat-
ing how the study of Arabic, Aramaic, Chaldean, and Syriac could illu-
minate Hebrew texts. In 1761 he organized a scholarly expedition to
the Arabian peninsula on behalf of the Danish crown, hoping to use
contemporary ethnographic knowledge to illuminate the language and
culture of an earlier period. In the Aesthetica in Nuce (1762), Hamann
attacked Michaelis's plan to rob scripture of poetic mystery. Instead, a
tlgurative crusade to the Levant designed to "resurrect the magic" of
natural languages was in order. Mohammed may have been a "lying
prophet" for Hamann, but knowledge of his words would help restore
the mystical power of biblical texts. 52 Hamann himself studied Arabic,
Hebrew, Chaldean, Aramaic, and dabbled in Armenian, Turkish, and
Tibetan. s1 The early Romantics took from him the idea that "poetry
[ was] the mother tongue of the human race ,,54 and that ancient eastern
IJnguages were the oldest and thus best expressed the literary and mag-
ical qualities of the divine.
The journal Hamann kept during his London conversion, later
published as the Diary of a Christian (1758), offered an alternative ac-
count of God's presence in language. His view of scripture drew on the
tradition of the Kabala and on arguments other Neo- Pietists launched
against the rationalist theology of Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Specif-
ically, Hamann adopted a type of "religious primitivism" in which the
unspoiled relationship that people of early cultures had with nature was
linguistic in character. Communion with a primordial language of na-
ture offered uninhibited access to God. 55 "Every phenomenon of na-
ture was a name," he explained, "the sign, the symbol, the promise of
a fresh and secret and ineffable but all the more intimate chosen union,
communication and communion of divine energies and ideas. All that
man in the beginning heard, saw with his eyes, contemplated and
touched with his hands, all this was a living word [lebendiges Wort]. For
God was the Word. ,,56 For Hamann, the word of God had not been re-
vealed in the abstract language of philosophers. Rather, God had been
"the poet at the beginning of days. ,,57 Like the writers he inspired in the
Sturm-und-Drang movement, Hamann insisted that inner experience,
teeling, and freedom of expression were more important for appre-
hending the divine than reason. 5R In this he drew on the skepticism of
David Hume, which held that the fallibility of the mind required faith

37
 CHAPTER 1

to transcend criticism. 59 Hamann also resurrected traditional Lutheran

themes regarding the authority of the Bible, the importance of a per-
sonal relationship to God, and the superrationality offaith. The creative
power of the word had been the medium through which God had
brought the world and all living creatures into existence; the same
word, as revealed in the gospel, retained its generative force to redeem
the spiritual life of man. 60
For Hamann, all of history and creation thus presented itself in
the secret language of the divine. The material world itself was a sym-
bolic text that could be read as a poetic expression of God's grace.
Hamann was an empiricist and a sensualist, assuming like Condillac
that thought and reason emerged in the mind's response to external
factors. But he insisted that sense impressions were always cloaked in
aesthetic and poetic meaning. In this way, the natural languages of na-
tions acquired elements of the same creative power through which God
had brought the world into existence. Hamann also explained the pres-
ence of God's force in the historical tongues of specific human commu-
nities based on the traditional Lutheran doctrine of condescension and
accommodation-the idea that the son had entered into the imperfect
historical world of man to impart divine grace. 61 Language mediated
between the divine and human for Hamann, bringing the powers of an
immanent God into the mouths of historical subjects.
The creative power of God's word and the symbolic nature of his-
tori cal experience framed how Hamann imagined the relationship be-
tween language, cognition, and human communities. On the one
hand, he believed language existed as an object in time and space. The
symbolic forms oflanguage did not transcend their embodiment in the
cultural life of particular human communities; rather, they were condi-
tioned by the people who spoke them. As he wrote to his friend G. I.
Lindner in 1759, this implied that "in the language of each Volk we find
its very history. ,,62 On the other hand, historical tongues were inspired
by God's creative power. Hamann believed that the divine elements of
language were the source and possibility of all thought and action. Lan-
guage was "the mother of reason and revelation, their alpha and
omega.,,63 As he wrote to Friedrich Jacobi: "without a word, no rea-
son-no world.,,64 Similarly, he depicted language as the "seducer of
our understanding. ,,65 Thought had to be "impregnated" by the "seed
of the divine Word" before taking form.66

38
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

The task of philosophy was not to measure the relative effective-

ness with which language represented an empirical or metaphysical re-
llitv but to acknowledge that the divinely inspired word of God was
~he- ~reative source of all symbolic meaning. There was no prelinguistic
fC>r!l1 of knowledge, in Hamann's view, and thus no means for detect-
ing error in language. A new language could not be invented to con-
veY truth more exactly, because there were no independent rational
st;uctures that existed outside of words.
On these grounds, Hamann accused Michaelis of treating the in-
fluence language held over the opinions of a people superficially. His
"Essay on an Academic Question" (1760) chided Michaelis for only
showing anecdotally how deficits in language affected the possibility of
reaching and communicating truth. His focus on error neglected to
theorize how thought itself was substantially conditioned by language;
Michaelis concentrated only on "the appearances" of this relationship.
for Hamann there was a deeper connection between "our soul's fac-
u! ty of perception and the body's ability to signify." A real treatment of
the topic, its "main doctrine" would have been to investigate "the re-
lationship of language" to "the means of communicating our thoughts
and understanding the thoughts of others." It was not just a question
of identifying the poverty or felicity with which a nation's forms al-
lowed for the advance of knowledge. Words had a far more complex
cognitive power that substantially determined thought. 67
Significantly, Hamann's review of Michaelis proposed, as Herder
would later, that language could be read as an artifact of the inner his-
torical development of national peoples. In his view, words were the
symbols in which the souls of human communities were expressed: "If
... the soul is determined by the condition of the body; then the same
may be applied to the body of an entire people [Volk]. The lineaments
of their language will correspond with the tendencies in their way of
thinking." According to Hamann, vernacular tongues documented the
historical evolution of a people's inner spirit. When brought "in con-
nection with time, place, and subject," different national languages
could offer "a sea of observations" on "the history of particular peo-
ples, societi~s, sects, and individuals. ,,68 Only through language could
the nation, the deeper meaning of its poetry, and its public and institu-
tional life be comprehended.

39
 CHAPTER 1

LANGUAGE AND THE VOLK: J. G. HERDER

Johann Gottfried Herder was a disciple and close friend of Hamann

and shared his Pietist East Prussian upbringing. Their acquaintance
dates to the English and Italian lessons Herder took from Hamann as
a student at the University of Konigsberg, and the pair remained in
close contact until Hamann's death in 1788. Like his mentor, Herder
harbored distaste for the rationalist court culture of Frederick the Great
and opposed German subservience to French traditions. He likewise re-
garded as limited the abstract view that the state emanated from the
power of a sovereign; he believed that a political community consisted
of more than a central administrative body and its subjects. For Herder,
language and a shared cultural legacy organically gave birth to a nation;
its members were united from below by an elusive Volksgeist. An or-
ganic theory oflanguage with roots in Pietist theology encouraged this
brand of ethnocultural nationalism. The nation in Germany was first a
religious concept before it was secularized by the generation of philol-
ogists who followed Herder.
Protestantism influenced Herder's reception of Enlightenment
thought, as it did for Hamann. But he located God in the soul of na-
tional communities. God spoke not through the symbolic forms oflan-
guage; rather, he made his presence felt in the human soul and encour-
aged people to create language from within. As will be seen, placing the
act of linguistic signification in the soul of the Volk eliminated the ef-
fects of nature and divine revelation in cognition. The historical subject
became the sole source of linguistic meaning as language lost its last
claims to a stable, external foundation. Words no longer stood for
ideas, rather they symbolized the mode or manner in which a national
people gave meaning to objects. At the same time, language itself was
transformed into a living organism whose inner principle of develop-
ment was itself a force guiding the thought and spirit of a people.
Herder's first reflections on language likewise evolved as a criti-
cism of Michaelis's academy essay. In the Fragments on Recent German
Literature (1767-68), Herder argued that the "genius oflanguage," a
term adopted from Condillac, was also the "genius of a nation's litera-
ture." He lamented that no one had yet done for the German language
what Michaelis had anecdotally done for others, to show the influence
the mother tongue had on the opinions of its speakers. Herder con-
tIded that he intended to reflect on "a similar, but not the same prob-

40
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

Iclll" as the biblical philologist."9 Language, he claimed, was "more

than an instrument"; it was "at the same time the receptacle and con-
tent of literature." Earlier scholars had already recognized that lan-
guage provided the "the form of the sciences ... in which ... thoughts
are fashioned." Herder proclaimed that "it is much more than this";
language was the form "according to which" thoughts are formed. His
goal in the Fragments was to characterize "the epochs ... of our lan-
guage" and to show how their historical progression had shaped four
areas of German cultural life. This was the groundwork for identifying
where the German language found itself in its own internal history and
what type of literature it could support. 71l Three of language's cultural
implications had been suspected by Michaelis: language influenced "ab-
stract worldly wisdom, the literature of a people, and every single sci-
ence." Herder had great expectations for what he considered to be "the
best" insight language study provided: "knowledge of the soul." Semi-
otics, the study of words and signification, was, in his view, more than
a tool in the service of philosophy, as it had been for Condillac and
Michaelis. It aimed at "deciphering the human soul out oflanguage.,,71
Herder's prize-winning treatise On the Origin of Language
( 1772) developed the anthropological implications of this perspective
in greater detail. Inspired by a remark Michaelis made in his Disserta-
tion, the Prussian Academy of Sciences had announced an essay contest
in 1769 on the topic of whether man could have invented language
when left to his own natural faculties. Shortly before, Maupertuis's own
reflections on the origin of language had provoked Johann Peter
Si.iGmilch to argue that the complexity and perfect ordering of lan-
guage could only be explained as a direct gift of God, and the academy
solicited refutations of this position.72 Herder's response drew on an al-
ready established line of argumentation that the possession of reason
and reflection, lacking in animals, provided the foundation of human
language. 73 The essay topic presumed that contestants would deny the
supernatural origins of language, but the opening sentence of Herder's
response was still provocative: "while still an animal, man already has
Ianguage.,,74
The no~elty of his position derives from its rejection of Condil-
lac's claim that nature had stimulated humanity's first words by provok-
ing outcries of the emotions. Herder accused his predecessor of un-
justly transforming animals into men when he described their gradual

41
 CHAPTER 1

acquisition of institutional signs and the power to reflect. The unique-

ness of humans lay for him in their being the "only creatures" endowed
from the start with language and with the innate ability to reason at
will. Language was "as essential to man as it is essential that he is
man. ,,75 In Herder's view, it was a vicious circle of argumentation to
claim that people could acquire words without already possessing rea-
son or that they became reflective without the capacity for language.
Condillac neglected to investigate the source of humans' representative
consciousness: "words arose because words had arisen before they
rose. ,,76
Two decades earlier, in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Among Men (1753), Rousseau had pointed to the contradictions inher-
ent in Condillac's argument. He was unable to resolve the question of
what came first: language, society, or the capacity for reasoned
thought. n Herder found his own way out of this dilemma by switching
the focus of the origin oflanguage debate from the problem of how na-
ture could inspire abstract, verbal signs to an investigation of the
human act of linguistic significatioll. 7H God had instilled the power to
reflect in the human soul and thereby gave humanity the power and
freedom to create language. Man, thus endowed, "learn[ ed] to stand
free, to find for himself a sphere of self-reflection, and seek his reflec-
tion in himself. ,,79 Key to understanding the origin of words was thus
to delve into the representative consciousness of human beings them-
selves and uncover their "art of changing into sound what is not
sound."Ho Here Herder relied on the soul's powers of perception and its
capacity for reflection (Besonnenheit). Even as the senses were con-
fronted with a "vast hovering dream of images," he argued, the reflec-
tive human mind could dwell on one perception at will and "select in
it distinguishing marks [Merkmale]." This subjective act of perception
generated the "sign through which the soul clearly remembered an
idea. "HI As Herder explained in his famous example of the sheep ("the
bleating-one"), man's reflective consciousness alone determined the
name by which an object was to be known. Words stood in direct rela-
tion to the will of speakers and mirrored the inner force with which
they imposed their subjective character on the world.
Hamann was distressed by his friend's decision to locate language
in the soul of the Volk, criticizing Herder in several anonymous reviews
and unpublished polemics. The mystic did not advocate a return to the
rationalism of Sii6milch, for whom the divine origin of language was a

42
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

rational truth, clear, distinct, and necessary, and not a leap of faith. But
hc feared Herder had wrongly asserted that human reflection had in-
vented language in complete autonomy and in so doing denied the cre-
ative power of God. Herder himself insisted that the prospect that man
invented language "reveal[ ed] God in the light of a higher day: his
work is a human soul which itself creates and continues to create its
own language because it is his work, because it is a human soul. ,,82 An
ordained Protestant minister at the court of Biickeburg and then
Weimar, he expected to "implant in the hearts of men the word that
can make souls holy."s3 Herder's theory oflanguage showed God work-
ing within the human mind; as Arnd Bohm has suggested, he extended
Adam's responsibility as a name-giver to mankind in general. H4 Signifi-
cantly, Herder did not understand language as a mechanism of sociabil-
ity;~S the word emerged in an act of inwardness, of the soul expressing
it~ essential human creativity.R6 Condillac's origin theory presumed a
communicative event between two isolated children. For Herder, the
"soul [of man] bleated in its interior as it were"; "the wild, lonely man
in the forest would have had to have invented language for himself,
cven if he had never spoken. ,,87
Herder's focus on the human act of linguistic signification had
implications both for both ethnological study and for a new under-
standing of subjectivity. Language, on the one hand, was the privileged
medium through which individuals and communities defined them-
selves. The mother tongue was inextricably linked to the "custom,
character, and origin of the people" that spoke it. 88 On the other hand,
as Charles Taylor has suggested, the possession of a representative con-
sciousness implied that human activity could no longer be seen as the
embodiment of an ideal external order or of a plan fixed independently
of the subject, but only as the expression of a freely self-unfolding life
ti:>rce or soul. Herder assumed all living beings to be unified by an in-
nate inner essence; their highest goal was attaining the full self-realiza-
tion of this idea through history.89
Theories of language were critical to the historical consciousness
that developed in the late eighteenth century, and it was language that
offered Herde'r a model of organic growth and decay. In 1767 he pro-
posed that each national tongue possessed "its own laws of change,,;90
these revealed a language's "origin, history, and the true nature of its
uniqueness. ,,91 Like other organic beings, languages traversed three de-
velopmental stages comparable to childhood, youth, and old age. These

43
 CHAPTER 1

phases marked "the circular course of all things," and Herder suggested
that language developed from "monosyllabic, rough, high tones,"
through a musical period of poetry and sensual imagery, to a masculine
and grammatical age of philosophy and prose.92 In his view, individuals
and nations were also organisms with a higher purpose; their develop-
ment was "genetic and organic" like that of language itselC 3
The notion that language followed its own internal model of de-
velopment implied that language itself could be an agent of historical
transformation, an independent force that helped determine the charac-
ter of a people, as well as how it exercised its powers of reason and re-
flection. Specifically, Herder imagined each national language (Nat-
ionalsprache) to be the "preserve" or "receptacle" for the "entire collec-
tion of a people's thoughts. ,,94 Through the centuries, each generation
of speakers had borrowed and selected its defining ideas from the na-
tional treasure trove, altered them, and deposited new and refined tra-
ditions back into the mother tongue. The store of linguistic forms re-
ceived by a community determined how its life force was expressed so
that in language, not only was the "reason of a nation" but also "its
character imprinted.,,9s It was an illusion, Herder asserted, that man
"had become all that he was by himself." The specific forms of a nation's
linguistic expression were in the moment of their articulation always
conditioned by a historical trajectory governed by the life force oflan-
guage itself. Linguistic development took place within a historical com-
munity, and despite the subject'S capacity for free self-expression, the ar-
ticulation of the person's humanity was shaped by an extended "spiritual
genesis formed by his education, parents, teachers, friends, ... by his
Volk and its fathers, ultimately by the entire chain of humanity. ,,96
In subsequent works, Herder returned to the implications the or-
ganic growth of diverse languages had for the universality of reason and
the formation of nationhood. National tongues marked for him "the
beginning of reason and culture," and the historically contingent ori-
gins of their systems of signification undermined universalistic notions
of truth. In his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind
(1785-87) Herder thus argued that no deeper metaphorical or essen-
tial relationship tied an object to the "arbitrary, completely immaterial
sounds" with which it was represented in the soul. There was no "sub-
stantial connection between language and the thought" it designated. 97
This had the result that "the spirit of words and their art of abstraction
is the most diverse among nations.,,98 Linguistic diversity was also the

44
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE
--
basis 011 which Herder argued that "the landscape of nations has ...
endless gradations of color.,,99 His belief in the pluralism and incom-
mensurability of cultural values and societies rested in the differences
separating national tongues. Language determined the character of a
n~ltion and was the organic force that guided its development from ori-
gins to old age. "He who was raised in a language," Herder wrote in
1795, "and learned to pour out his heart in her, express his soul in her,
he belongs to the people [Volk] of this language ... a nation is built and
,,100
reare d l)y means 0 fl anguagc.
This claim enabled philologists to place language studies at the
core of research into the formation of culture and community. In the
Fral/ments, Herder outlined an ambitious philological project on which
nineteenth-century scholars with better understandings of grammar and
etymology later embarked. He remarked on the difficult yet rewarding
task of a "national philologist" who interpreted the history of words
themselves for its greatest possible ramifications. lUI A true language
scholar, Herder suggested, would be "a man of three heads" who com-
bined philosophy, history, and philology. "Like a stranger," he would
"wander through peoples and nations and learn foreign tongues and
languages, so that he might speak intelligently about his own.,,102 In the
Ideas, Herder again raised the expectation that comparative philologists
complete a massive ethnographic project of mapping human communi-
ties. Language was the "means to develop the humanity of our species."
Therefore, "a comparison of different cultivated languages with the dif-
krent revolutions of their peoples would reveal ... a changing land-
scape of the manifold development of the human spirit." 103
At the end of the eighteenth century, the philologists of the na-
lion-most with classical training-still lacked the technical skills and
linguistic materials necessary to complete what Herder envisioned as a
"general physiognomy of nations based on their languages. ,,104 General
theories on the origin of language were highly speculative in the ab-
sence of adequate data from actual languages, and despite the broad
historical orientation of eighteenth-century linguistics, methods for es-
tablishing gene.alogical relations among languages were largely defi-
cient. Most research concentrated on the historical connections be-
tween the vocabularies and grammatical structures of Latin and the
Romance languages, but even here etymological evidence of lexical
similarities was often obscured by a rigid classification oflanguages into
syntactic types. lOS Eighteenth-century comparativists had compiled

45
 CHAPTER 1

polyglot word lists, dictionaries, and texts, as well as linguistic atlases,

but they were still in search of the missing link that Sanskrit or ancient
Indic would provide between European and Asian languages. Compar-
ative-historical philologists had the benefit of Sir William Jones when
they took on Herder's project, but this was not before his philosophy
of language came under attack from another man from Konigsberg.

THE LINGUISTIC TURN

IN TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY

The Copernican revolution that Immanuel Kant's transcendental phi-

losophy unleashed on German thinkers at the end of the eighteenth
century all but uncoupled language and thought as the relationship had
emerged within the French empirical tradition. German idealists
tended not to foreground the mediating function of language or to
dwell on the significance of signs and grammatical structures in pro-
cesses of representation. For an interesting moment at the turn of the
century, however, Hamann, Herder, and a number of avowed Kantians
tried to articulate how considerations of language meshed with tran-
scendental philosophy. The linguistic critique of Kant produced among
select German Romantics a conception of language in which the evo-
lution of national tongues resembled the coming-into-being of an orig-
inal idea or spirit in the historical world. This reinforced existing no-
tions oflanguage as a self-determining organic being, while challenging
in some respects the very foundations of Kantian philosophy.
Most Kantians neglected to regard the cognitive process as a lin-
guistic activity. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) claimed to identifY
the a priori forms and categories that governed the human understand-
ing. Kant hoped the work would help liberate reason from its depen-
dence on sensual experience and thereby affirm the freedom and auton-
omy of the cognitive subject. Because he considered language to be an
empirical condition of experience, it played little role in Kant's under-
standing of the a priori conditions that made knowledge possible and
was never the subject of sustained discussion. Some of his followers as-
sumed that the categories in which the phenomenal world was concep-
tualized could he found codified in any and all natural languages. 106 But
twentieth-century critics have cited the omission of langauge as the
chief weakness of transcendental philosophy. Kant neglected to address
one of the main problems faced by Western thought since Plato and
Aristotle. Moreover, any attempt to interpret the a priori categories of

46
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

pure reason as the product of a specific historical tongue would have

seriously compromised his claim to free knowledge from empirical con-
ditioning. lo7
Hamann and Herder were the first to decry Kant's apparent si-
lence on linguistic matters and, in so doing, forced the brief linguistic
turn that transcendental philosophy took in the late eighteenth century.
Four years younger than Kant, Hamann had known and lived within
miles of the fellow Konigsberg native for most of his life. The Berens
tamily had unsuccessfully engaged Kant to reconvert Hamann to the
cause of the Aufklarung in 1759; a series of philosophical confronta-
tions between the two regarding the nature of human rationality fol-
lowed. In 1781 Kant's publisher asked Hamann to review the Critique
of Pure Reason) and he was the first to receive the galley sheets, turning
to Herder for help in understanding the work. The result was a short
essay titled the "Metacritique of the Purity of Reason" (1784), which
took aim from a linguistic perspective at the transcendental foundations
of Kant's philosophy. Until surreptitiously slipped to a publisher in
1799, the essay enjoyed an "underground existence," circulating to
friedrich Jacobi, Herder, and the third Metakritiker, Salomon Mai-
mon. l08 "The major question still remains," Hamann insisted, "How is
the capacity to think possible? No deduction is needed to prove the ge-
nealogical priority of language over the several holy functions of logical
propositions and syllogisms. ,,109 He doubted that the categorical
schemas underlying the analysis of experience were language indepen-
dent. This prospect opened the possibility of rousing language in a rad-
ical critique of ontology and the coherence of the knowing subject.
The a priori categories that Kant claimed to constitute grounds for
the possibility of experience were, according to Hamann, mere linguis-
tic conventions. Foreshadowing Friedrich Nietzsche, Hamann sug-
gested that Kant's metaphysical edifice was erected on nothing more
than linguistic practice. "The entire capacity to think rests upon lan-
guage," he insisted. In Hamann's view, language was "the first, last, and
only organon and criterion of reason, which dismisses it with no ...
credit." Words were the ultimate pillars upon which transcendental cat-
egories could be built: "Sounds and letters" were, according to
Hamann, "pure forms a priori ... , they are the true 'aesthetic' ele-
ments of all human knowledge and reason. ,,110 He concluded that
thinking was only the actualization of certain possibilities inherent in
individual languages. Kant had falsely assumed that the categorical

47
 CHAPTER 1

structures of experience were independent of historical existence and

the latent possibilities present in concretely existing languages. In truth,
the historical embodiment of national tongues set limits on what could
be thought and experienced. Therefore, transcendental reason was no
more than a construction based on the language in which it was artic-
ulated. 111
Hamann's critique of transcendental philosophy highlighted one
of the central problems that would preoccupy the first generation of
post- Kantian thinkers. He blamed Kant's inability to address linguistic
issues on an unnatural separation of the noumenal and phenomenal
realms. Kant's distinction between understanding and sensibility, be-
tween a priori concepts and the forms of intuition, had artificially cut
reason off from language. 112 "If sensibility and understanding as the
two branches of human knowledge spring from one common root,"
Hamann questioned, "to what end such a violent, unauthorized and
willful separation of that which nature has joined together! Will not
both branches wither away and die through a dichotomy and division
of their common root?"I!.' Hamann suggested that language offered a
unifYing point of contact between the a priori concepts of the under-
standing and the intuitions of sensibility. In order to overcome Kant's
dualism, Hamann suggested, philosophy must investigate the connec-
tion between thought and language. He was the first to identifY the
need to search for an inner unity between concepts and sense impres-
sions. Subsequent idealists, including Friedrich Schleiermacher and G.
W. F. Hegel, concurred with this analysis but substituted other mediat-
ing devices, such as religion and spirit, where Hamann relied on lan-
114
guage.
Herder's public break with his renowned former teacher was
slower in coming. From 1762 to 1764 Herder had been Kant's most
devoted and talented student. But Herder's friendship with Hamann
slowly became the source of a growing tension between the pair, as did
the critical reviews Kant published of the Ideas. In 1797 years of re-
pressed animosity erupted in Herder, triggered by the impact Kant's
philosophy was having on his theological students and by his own son's
gravitating toward]. G. Fichte. lls Herder showed open hostility toward
Kant in his own Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason (1799).
The book generated a commotion at the time, second only to the up-
roar caused by Fichte's being dismissed from the University ofJena on

48
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

charges of atheism in the same year; it was widely read and debated
among the early German Romantics.
Especially in the second section titled "Reason and Language,"
Herder argued that a critique of language, "the organon of our rea-
son," was the only legitimate foundation tor philosophy. He tried to
shift the focus of Kant's project from defining reason in the realm of
pure thought, which existed independently of linguistic expression, to
the realm of language. Kant, in his view, had failed to show "how we
arrive a priori at such concepts. ,,116 The only acceptable critique of cog-
nition was for Herder "Sprachkritik"-a study of language that ana-
lyzed the conceptual resources available in natural tongues. "Meta-
physics," he insisted, must "become a philosophy of human language.
What an immense field! How much is there yet in it to observe, order,
sow, and harvest! ... it is the true critique of pure reason as well as of
the imagination; it alone contains the criteria for the senses and for the
understanding."ll? Like Hamann, Herder opposed developing distinct
or specialized philosophical languages that claimed to rise above the
language of experience. The grounds for the possibility of any philo-
sophical discourse were already present in conventional language.
Herder insisted more adamantly on the radically historical nature of
language than either Hamann or Salomon Maimon. For him, the pos-
sibilities for cognition were historically and culturally relative to the
evolution of natural languages through time. IIB
Early supporters of Kant found more affirming ways of integrat-
ing language into transcendental philosophy, arguing that he raised an
intriguing set of new linguistic concerns. As Pietro Perconti has sug-
gested, Kant stood on the threshold of a theory of language in that he
reflected on the prelinguistic conditions that make linguistic meaning
possible. To the extent that Kant contributed to a new theory of men-
tal representation, he opened a space for his followers to discuss the for-
mative role of symbolic systems in such tasks as recognizing objects and
using empirical concepts. 119 Within the first post- Kantian generation
there were a number of language theorists who deliberated on the role
of words and grammatical structures within their mentor's theory of
mental representation. Karl Leonard Reinhold (1758-1823), Georg
Michael Roth (1769-1817), and August Ferdinand Bernhardi
(1769-1820) interpreted language as the external presentation
(J)arstellung) of internal representations (Vorstellungen) by articulate

49
 CHAPTER 1

sounds. In their view, language was an object of experience, but at the

same time it was conditioned by the deep rules of the mind. They set
out to discover the capacity of language to shape the mental faculty of
representation and the connections it had to the a priori concepts of the
· 120
un d erstand mg.
Kant's best-known early interpreter, K. L. Reinhold, was one of
the first to work out the linguistic implications of transcendental phi-
losophy. In the Critique of Judgment Kant had suggested that percep-
tible symbols, such as language, were necessary to connect intuitions
gained from sense impressions with the concepts of pure reason. Rein-
hold expanded this observation into his Search for a New Theory of the
Human Representational Faculty (1789), a text that considered the
role of verbal language in the rules for generating mental representa-
tions. In his view, the productive imagination had the capacity to cre-
ate schemata, symbolic forms that bridged understanding and sensibil-
ity in knowledge of the natural world. Several years later, Roth adapted
the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition of universal gram-
mar to analyze what such schemes might entail in linguistic terms.
Port-Royal grammarians had supposed that all languages had the same
essential structure derived from the universal forms of reason. In his
Antihermes or Philosophical Investigations into the Pure Concept of
Human Language and General Linguistic Theory (1795) Roth theo-
rized the possibility of creating a pure universal grammar, one derived
not from natural tongues but from a Kantian interpretation of human
. I lacU
representatlOna L. Ity. 121
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Kant's self-appointed
spokesperson among the Jena Romantics, articulated the concept of
language that became most characteristic of idealists, one derived from
his readings of transcendental philosophy. Ficlne had succeeded Rein-
hold at the local university in 1794 and credited his predecessor with
suggesting to him that the Kantian dualism between the theoretical and
practical realms could be overcome with a "first principle" that would
systematize all philosophy.122 Fichte's essay "Concerning the Faculty of
Speech and the Origin of Language" (1795) derived language from
people's inherent capacity to be rational. As Lia Formigari has argued,
the piece marks an interesting moment of continuity between the nat-
uralist linguistic theory of the French Enlightenment and nineteenth-
century German idealism. 123 Like his empiricist predecessors, Fichte de-
scribed the historical transformation of an original language

50
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

(Ursprache) from gestures and natural signs into arbitrary signs and
complex forms of grammar and syntax, only he argued that all hypothe-
ses regarding the origin of language had to be based on an ideal prin-
ciple if they were to be considered valid. "One cannot rely," he ex-
plained "on the arbitrary suggestion of special circumstances under
whieh a language might perhaps have arisen .... One cannot content
himself with showing that and how a language could have been in-
vented; rather, one must deduce the necessity of this invention from
the nature of human reason: One must show that and how language
must have been invented. ,,124 Fichte transformed the natural history of
bnguage into what he called "an a priori history of language" that
traced the unfolding of the;: "idea of language" as such. The nature of
the original language must be deduced from "a principle that itself lies
in the nature of man "-humanity's rational capacity for speech.lls The
majority ofFichte's own essay was dedicated to explaining how the Ur-
jprache as idea evolved into historical human speech and assumed gram-
matical form.
Idealist scholars among the German Romantics tended to regard
language as a timeless reflection of rational structures. They radically
dehistoricized the question of the origin of language and tried to show
the necessity of, and to justifY linguistic forms based on, transcenden-
tal categories. 126 In his Philosophy of Art (1802), for example, F. W. J.
Schelling explained the genesis of language by the intrinsic necessity
that drives the idea to provide itself with a body in which to fulfill it-
self; historical tongues were a manifestation of the idea of language in
the real. Being of an ideal essence, language had to be considered an
spontaneous, autonomous organism, which most closely resembled its
underlying idea in its earliest forms. 127 The notion that language existed
first as an idea reversed the notion that primitive man was a beast driven
by his needs and passions to substitute abstract signs for grunts. The
Romantics believed language degenerated from a state of perfection; a
divine force spontaneously bestowed upon humans the rational capac-
ity for language and with it the conditions of their humanity.
fichte's notion of the "idea of language" endowed words with a
new type of constructive power, one the Romantics associated less with
cognition than with the aesthetic forms of human culture. As James
Starn has observed, Fichte seemed to imply that "language lives and
acts by its own independent rules and dynamics, almost as though lan-
guage would exist even if there were no speakers of it. ,,12~ At the turn

51
 CHAPTER 1

of the century, language as an idea acquired the same spontaneity of

any other self-determining idealist subject. Novalis, for example, who
studied Fichte's essay in the two years after it was published, described
poetry as "language enthusiasm." He believed that "Sanskrit would
speak in order to speak because speaking would be its pleasure and its
nature." The poet credited words with having a life of their own, seem-
ingly independent of the will and personality of speakers: "The essen-
tial idiosyncrasy of language, that language only cares about itself-this
nobody knows .... [Words] make up a world for themselves-they sim-
ply play with themselves, express nothing other than their own wonder-
ful natures, and it is for exactly this reason that they are so expres-
sive. ,,129 Other early Romantic poets, such as S. T. Coleridge, the
spokesperson of idealist philosophy in Britain, likewise depicted words
as "living powers," autonomous agents free to constitute the world in
and through themselves. 130
Fichte's essay likewise indicates that within an idealist framework,
the cognitive role of language was reduced to the representation of
thoughts once they left the realm of pure reason. In this view, language
was not a precondition for thought. "I do not intend to prove here,"
he wrote, "that man cannot think or have general, abstract concepts
without language. He certainly can do so through the images that his
fantasy creates for itself. Language, in my opinion, has been considered
far too important, when one believed that without it no use at all of
reason could have taken place. ,,131 For Fichte all language arose out of
the natural need for one human being to communicate his rationality
to another. The original idea of language had been "to indicate our
thoughts to each other using arbitrary signs.,,132 Its very possibility pre-
supposed self-reflection in the form of an intention to communicate
one's thoughts and to be recognized as rational. For Fichte the act of
self-reflection had a determinate structure that was not derived from a
particular linguistic formulation or from specific content. This was the
Grundsatz or the scientific foundation around which he hoped to sys-
tematize Kant's philosophy and construct a unified "theory of knowl-
edge" or Wissenschaftslehre. His recourse to a language-independent act
of self-conscious reflection merely bypassed the concerns of the
Metakritiker, however, and was an uncertain foundation for defending
transcendental philosophy against a living, willfullanguage.13.l
Following the publication of Herder's Metacritique in 1799, Au-

52
-T list
CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

Ferdinand Bernhardi, considered to be the expert on linguistic

~lattcrs among the early German Romantics, attempted to reinscribe
language into Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. A teacher and rector at the
Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Berlin, Bernhardi had studied classical philol-
ogy and linguistic theory with F. A. Wolf at the University of Halle and
\Vas a close personal friend of Fichte after he moved to the Prussian cap-
ital. In 1800 Bernhardi reviewed Herder's essay in the journal
Atheneum and later expanded his defense of Kant into a two-volume
Theon of Language (Sprachlehre). Bernhardi's Theory of Language
( 1801-3) attempted to create a new type of universal grammar that
supported the transcendental categories of Kantian philosophy. '-'4 As
sl1ch, the two volumes represent the only serious response to Herder's
demand that transcendental philosophy be grounded in Sprachkritik.
Its publication coincided with the bitter break-up of Bernhardi's mar-
ri,lge to Sophie Tieck, however, and its impact was overshadowed by
that event's role in dissolving the circle of Berlin Romantics. 135
The Theory of Language argued for the central role of language in
mental representations, cautioning that a universal theory of grammar
and syntax must be part of any critical philosophy. In contrast to Fichte,
Bernhardi believed that the structure of self-conscious reflection could
not be developed independently of linguistic matters. He insisted in-
stead that transcendental philosophy had to be built upon "the funda-
mental principles of language," the Sprach-Grundsatze that mediated
between the understanding and sense impressions. I", The bulk of Bern-
hardi's two volumes was dedicated to reducing "the various types of
presentation which occur in language ... to a universal grammatical
schema."m He argued that the various parts of speech, grammar, and
syntax matched the transcendental scheme that Kant presented. For
Bernhardi the languages of ordinary life manifested the same qualities
and criteria required of philosophical thought. In every national
tongue, for example, nouns embodied the Kantian category of quan-
tity, adjectives corresponded to quality, and verbs to modality. '-'8 Lan-
guage, he concluded, must necessarily have a formal structure support-
ing the human capacity for intersubjective communication and
representation.
Bernhardi's transcendental grammar suggested to its first reviewer
the outlines of an empirical project that combined critical philosophy
\\ith a rigorous analysis of the way national tongues mediated pure rea-

53
 CHAPTER 1

son. August Wilhelm Schlegel concurred in 1803 that questions re-

garding the origin of language had only been obscured by anecdotal
"observations of actual languages" and by "travelers' reports about
primitive peoples." He aftIrmed Fichte's precept that the idea of lan-
guage could only be deduced "from the organism of human mental ac-
tivities." In addition, Schlegel's review proposed relating "the special-
ized grammars of individual languages" to the "universal theory of
language." Following Herder, Schlegel believed that national tongues
"expresse[ d] the inner organism" or soul of those who spoke them;
"comparative grammar" allowed philologists to determine "what is
most characteristic" among national groups. But he suggested that
comparative language studies could also delineate how the structures of
diverse national tongues related to "the law-governed organism of lan-
guage in general. ,,139 The demands of the project were technically too
ambitious for the state of comparative linguistics at the time. In the
decades that followed, however, Wilhelm von Humboldt applied the
new insights of comparative philologists to a philosophical survey of the
diverse transcendental thuught structures enabled by national tongues.

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT'S

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

Wilhelm von Humboldt took active part in the early Romantic reaction
to Kant, translating the philosophical concerns of his followers into a
concrete and influential research agenda for language scholars. Reason,
for Humboldt, may have been a spontaneous product of the creative
mind, but it was also conditioned by the organic, historical develop-
ment of particular national tongues. His attempt to reconcile these two
positions produced empirical analyses of the relative effectiveness with
which historical languages fostered mental activity. Humboldt's work is
often recognized as the forerunner of the so-called linguistic relativity
thesis. This phrase is taken frum the work of two twentieth-century
American linguists, Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf,
who argued that the words, grammatical structures, and habitual lan-
guage practices associated with individual national tongues condition
the worldview of their speakers.140 The constructivist aspects of Hum-
boldt's linguistic philosophy fall just as much within the tradition of
German idealism, as they emanate from the legacy of French thought.
Therefore, it is misleading to assume that nineteenth-century German
linguists excluded issues relating national tongues to the mind and rep-

54
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

rcsentation. The attempt to reinsert language into Kantian philosophy

gave rise to a particular type of Erkenntniskritik or epistemological cri-
~ique that followers of Wilhelm von Humboldt carried through to the
latc nineteenth century.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was a close personal friend of Hum-
boldt and introduced him to the problem of mediating between reason
,1Ild sensibility in 1788. 141 When Humboldt moved to Jena in search of
,111 intellectual vocation, he had thus already confronted the difficulty of
reconciling the spontaneity of human reason with the receptivity of
scnsibility. Fichte also took up residence in the center of German clas-
sicism in the spring of 1794, and it was under his tutelage that Hum-
boldt's appreciation of Kant turned to linguistic matters. Fichte's lec-
tures and his essays on language had such a profound impact on
Humboldt's intellectual development that he later found himself de-
tending Kant against the disciples of Condillac in Paris. The ideologues,
.1S Humboldt explained in his notebooks, wrongly stressed the recep-
tivity of the mind, assuming that sensibility alone conditioned lan-
guage. Kant asserted that free mental activity generated representa-
tions, and human cognition depended on the spontaneity of the
subject. In Humboldt's view, empiricist conceptions of language could
not sufficiently account for creative acts of the mind. Only a transcen-
dental approach to language could successfully depict words as free,
constructive subjects, while recalling that they were also objectively
conditioned by historical existence. 142
Language thus enjoyed a liminal status for Humboldt, existing
between the subjective and objective realms of experience. It was for
him what the synthesis of judgment was for Kant. 14 ' Words and gram-
matical structures acted as the filter through which the mind perceived
and represented the external world. "No thought, not even the most
pure," Humboldt argued in "On Speaking and Thinking" (1794-95),
"can occur without the help of the general forms of our sensibility. ,,144
Humboldt agreed with Kant that perception resulted from an individ-
ual interacting with an object of experience. For him, however, only the
active application of language to sensation could bridge the gap be-
tween a priori concepts and intuitions. Language served Humboldt as
an "intermediate world" (Zwischenwelt);145 it was "the great point of
crossing from subjectivity to objectivity." 146
Humboldt's conception of language resembled Fichte's in that
both derived the idea of language from rational structures already pre-

55
 CHAPTER 1

sent in the human mind. Much of Humboldt's empirical research was

dedicated to cataloging the universal qualities required for representa-
tion in the form of a general grammar. As he stated in the Principles of
the General Linguistic Type ( 1824), "the basic determinations of gram-
mar are already contained in the universal rules of thought .... In this
area universal grammar falls together with logic to a certain extent. ,,147
Like A. F. Bernhardi, Humboldt applied the Port-Royal tradition of
general grammar to support the universality of Kant's categories of per-
ception and understanding. He had read Bernhardi's Sprachlehre im-
mediately upon its publication in 1801; the two were acquainted in
Berlin, and Humboldt readily acknowledged his debt to his predeces-
sor: "1 am accustomed to follow Bernhardi's linguistic principles in
dealing with concepts of general grammar. ,,14R For example, he con-
cluded with Bernhardi that Kantian categories were most apparent in
the four grammatical cases, the nominative, dative, genitive, and ac-
• 149
cusatlve.
As a trained philologist, however, Humboldt analyzed the gram-
matical structures of individual national tongues to determine how
each fulfilled its representational function. Empirical research was to es-
tablish how national tongues articulated the inborn capacity humans
had for language (Sprachvermiigen) while responding to the historical
world they inhabited. lso Upon retiring from public life in 1819, Hum-
boldt wrote extensively on the diversity of human language construc-
tion and its cultural and philosophical implications. The essays pro-
posed a hierarchy of national tongues based on how effectively the
grammatical forms of each approximated Kantian categories. Did some
languages come closer to embodying the ideals of a universal, transcen-
dental grammar? Because Humboldt believed nationality conditioned
the historical existence of language, it is advisable first to examine his
views on this relationship before turning to his linguistic findings.
Humboldt's early essays on classical antiquity presupposed a con-
ventional reciprocity of language and nationality. Like Herder and the
early Romantics, he cited language, poetry, philosophy, and literature
as contributing factors in the formation of national groups. lSI Later,
Humboldt focused on the specific relationship between nationality and
the structure of language. There is an ambivalence in these writings as
to whether national character determined the forms of language or
whether language itself affected how a nation thought. His essay "On
the National Character of Languages" (1821/22) suggested that it was

56
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

historically impossible to determine what priority should be given to

language as a cause of national diversity. The "individuality of nations
and epochs is so entwined with that of languages" that empirical re-
se~lrch could never restore the "the beginning of such a progression. ,,152
In the decade that followed, Humboldt gravitated to the position
that national character existed prior to and itself molded the so-called
inner t<xm of language. 153 By his account, national character existed as
~1 "living force" (Kraft). It was an elusive energy, impulse, or vitality
that produced in all people of a nation a common emotional orienta-
tion or instinctive mood. 154 When evaluating how the "mental individ-
u;llity of a people" related to the "shape of its language," Humboldt
explained, "we must see the real principle of explanation and true de-
termining ground in the mental power of nations, since this alone
stands independently living before us. ,,155 Feelings and desires internal
to the mind were active, prelinguistic forces that shaped what Hum-
boldt termed the "inner form" of language. The particular way a lan-
guage denoted the relations between the parts of a sentence originated
in the depths of the nation that spoke it. Humboldt rejected the notion
that race, skin color, physical build, or physiognomy had an impact on
the development of national tongues. Nevertheless, Jeffrey Grossman
and others have seen a racialist dimension in Humboldt's notion that
an inborn national character could be an original cause of linguistic
.. is()
vanatIon.
The assumption that some mental activity occurred prior to lan-
guage testifies to the impact John Locke had on Humboldt. But Hum-
boldt also claimed that "to regard words as mere signs," as the empir-
ical tradition had done, was the "basic error that destroys all linguistics
and all correct evaluation oflanguage.,,157 For him, all thought that in-
volved judgment or awareness depended on speech.158 As Humboldt
stated in the Principles: "language [is] not only a designation for
thoughts that are formed independently; rather, it is the creative organ
of thought itself. ,,159 Language had a constructive role in the processes
of concept formation and perception. It was, in this sense, a transcen-
dental precondition for constituting objects. loo "Intellectual activity,"
Humboldt concluded,

spiritual and internal throughout, and to a certain extent

passing without a trace, becomes, by the tone of discourse,
externalized and perceptible for the senses .... Intellectual

57
 CHAPTER 1

activity and language are therefore one and inseparable; one

cannot merely regard the former as that which produces the
latter and the latter as that which is produced. Intellectual
activity is connected to the necessity of entering into a con-
nection with a tone; thinking cannot otherwise attain clarity,
the representation [Vorstellung] cannot become a concept
[BegriffJ .161

Language, for Humboldt, was more than a means of communication

or a mechanism of sociability. "Speech," he agreed with Herder, was "a
necessary condition for the thought of a sole person in solitary isola-
t· ,,162
Ion.
The constitutive role language had in thought implied that the
forms of language also structured the subjective life of speakers. 163 In
1811-12 Humboldt had suggested that "language is an independent
being, guiding and controlling man, even as it is produced by him.,,164
Vitalist metaphors in biology, as well as the Romantic aesthetic theory
of A. W. Schlegel, in which poetry was a creative force, contributed to
this view ofianguage. 165 Humboldt likewise based the autonomy oflan-
guage on its status as an organic, historical being. In his view, each na-
tional tongue was an "organic totality." It lived and changed over time,
vicariously altering the concepts through which the understanding me-
diated experience. He explained in On the Diversity of Human Lan-
guage Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the
Human Species (1830-35) that "we must look upon language, not as a
dead product, but far more as producing. . . . It is not a product
[e12Jon], but an activity [ene12Jeia]. Its definition can therefore only be
a genetic one." 1M Historicizing language as a living organism endowed
national tongues with autonomous, constructive powers that molded
the thought of the speaking subject.
Humboldt specifically held language responsible for creating the
unique worldview ( Weltansicht) that shaped how a people thought and
experienced the sensual world. "Thinking," he suggested in 1820, "is
not merely dependent on language in general, but also, to a certain ex-
tent, it is determined by each individual language." The constructivist
aspects of Humboldt's linguistic theory are most apparent in his discus-
sions of the different conceptual worlds generated by the diversity of
historical languages. What members of a nation could think was deter-
mined and confined to the total conceptual possibilities available to

58
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

their national tongue at different moments in history. "Each lan-

guage," Humboldt elaborated, "carries at every point of its existence
;he expression of all concepts which at that time can be developed in
the nation. Further, each is at every point in its life exactly equal to the
conceptual range of the nation at that time. Each ultimately, in each of
its states, develops the totality of a worldview, in that it contains expres-
sions tor all representations that the nation makes about the world, and
fiJr all the sensations the world brings forth in it. ,,167 On these grounds,
H umbuldt concluded that each language drew a closed conceptual
"circle" around the nation that spoke it. Individuals could only reach
beyond the limits of their mental horizons by switching languages.
Learning a foreign tongue enabled, according to Humboldt, the "ac-
quisition of a new standpoint in the previous worldview. "I<>X
The three-volume Kawi work that Humboldt assembled in the
last years of his life detailed what the empirical study of language re-
vealed about various national capacities for intellectual and cultural de-
velopment. The book-length introduction proposed that classifYing
languages into types would help researchers order nations based on
how well various grammatical structures fostered "the growth of man's
mental powers. ,,169 The Kawi language was to provide a common link
through which the world's tongues could be related and opposed.
Humboldt had begun studying South Pacific languages in 1827, focus-
ing on Malaysian tongues. Kawi, the courtly language of Java, was in-
triguing because it mixed "Sanscritic" languages and what are now
known as Western and Central Austronesian tongues. 1711 These had a
wide dispersal throughout the Pacific Rim and thus allowed for inte-
grating other language families as well. By analyzing their "organic
structure" and their "methud of constructing language," Humboldt
npected to discover the possibilities for thought, expression, and intel-
lectual development built into a broad swath of language types. l7l
The hierarchy of national tongues that Humboldt proposed dis-
tinguished three types oflanguage based on how they designated gram-
matical relationships in a sentence: inflection, agglutination, and incor-
poration. These terms did not represent absolute principles of
classification; any given language could mix grammatical methods. 172
But Humboldt maintained, as Friedrich Schlegel had before him, a
clear distinction between organic and mechanical schemes. Sanskrit and
other inflectional languages, which included Hebrew, were, in his view,
the only ones to achieve a truly organic unity of designation. By detl-

59
 CHAPTER 1

nition, these languages signified the grammatical function of words by

fusing onto a radical affixes that had no intrinsic meaning beyond their
role in clarifYing syntax.l7.1 The use of "meaningless" symbols to desig-
nate grammar was for Humboldt preferable to employing indepen-
dently meaningful words or affixes. 174 He believed inflectional lan-
guages to be "more excellent" and "perfect," "correct," and "happy";
they were the "most natural and most suitable" and distinguished by a
"completeness and purity" of structure. 175 Humboldt drew a contin-
uum between two "extreme" linguistic types: Sanskrit, the form in
which "the mental cultivation of mankind has evolved most happily";
and Chinese, which departed "furthest from the natural demands of
language. ,,176 The advantage of inflection was that it supposedly repre-
sented most completely the universal laws of cognition that could be
derived from the rational structures of the mind. According to Martin
Manchester, Humboldt held that this language type better maintained
at the symbolic, linguistic level distinctions that supposedly existed at
the level of concept formation and perception. 177
Wilhelm von Humboldt's synthesis of transcendental philosophy
and empirical language study was not easily replicated. A. P. Bernhardi
himself had insisted on separating the "philosophical approach" from
the "historical approach" to language. 178 And the early nineteenth cen-
tury witnessed a growing breach between empirical philologists who
pursued comparative-historical studies and more speculative generalists
interested the philosophy ofianguage. 179 It is testimony to the legacy of
Kant that later German idealists largely dismissed the epistemological
concern tor language that intrigued the Romantics. There is neverthe-
less a forgotten chapter of German linguistic philosophy that carried
Humboldt's work into the twentieth century.'80 After 1850 figures such
as Heymann Steinthal, Moritz Lazarus, and Gustav Gerber rekindled
Humboldt's ambitious philosophical project. Under the influence ofT.
P. Herbart's psychology, they reopened questions of how language
structured patterns of representation and cognition. It is to them that
Humboldt's posthumous reputation as a language theorist is due. And,
as chapter 6 shows, it is through Humboldt that the viability of using
language to critique metaphysics and the autonomy of the subject was
preserved.

PHILOLOGY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

The professional nineteenth-century German philologists whose insti-

60
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

tutional standing Wilhelm von Humboldt helped secure largely

avoided philosophical consideration of the role national tongues played
in cognition. The generation of language scholars who came of age
after 1800 confined their research to empirical analysis of specific na-
tional tongues and the history of the communities that spoke them.
The metaphysical critique of Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt was of
little use in this endeavor. Still, the intimate connection this trio drew
between words and national cultures redefined the discipline of philol-
ogy as it had been practiced to date. For most of the eighteenth cen-
tury, philology-primarily the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew-had
existed as a supplemental field subsumed within theological and law
faculties. Scholars of language tended to the epistemological needs of
their host disciplines by exploring the sign systems of their respective
discourses. Through recitation, disputation, and formal textual recon-
struction, students of language learned ideal rhetorical strategies for
transmitting knowledge ofthe material and metaphysical world. Famil-
iarity with classical rhetoric and grammar, for example, prepared
lawyers for reading legal texts and trained future ministers in the skills
of biblical criticism. Philologists provided a largely pedagogical service,
relaying mastery of a style of eloquence and erudition required of the
educated elite.(M(

Herder's critique of Enlightenment semiotics helped transform

philology into a discipline in which language was central to a historiciz-
ing and secularizing program of cultural studies. His characterization of
language as a historical being entwined in the construction of culture
and community enabled classicists in the late eighteenth century to re-
define the intellectual terrain of traditional philology and establish
themselves as specialists and professionals in a highly regarded, inde-
pendent field of cultural studies. The transformation of Altphilologie
into a genuinely critical and interpretive discipline has been well docu-
mented by Robert Leventhal and requires only a brief summary here.
In the 1770s the founder of the prestigious philological seminar in
G6ttingen, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812), reconceived the
task of philological study in response to Herder's claim that words
themselves embodied historically particular modes of giving meaning
to the world. His cohort of influential classicists asserted the impor-
tance of philology as a tool for reconstructing the historical and cultural
totality of the ancient world, demonstrating at the same time the im-
portance of linguistic inquiry and a self-reflective reading of texts to

61
 CHAPTER 1

other disciplines in the humanities. 1M2 Humboldt himself served as head

of the newly created Department of Culture in the Prussian Interior
Ministry from 1809 to 1810, and he institutionalized language study
as the mainstay of humanistic inquiry.
Classical philology thus stood at the fore as the German universi-
ties evolved from pedagogical institutions and schools of professional
training to modern, research-oriented institutions. Friedrich August
Wolf, the first in 1777 to matriculate as a student of philology, excluded
pedagogical and rhetorical training from the curriculum of the seminar
in classical studies he established in Halle in 1787, dismissing with dis-
dain the narrow pedantry and empty formalism of older forms of lan-
guage studies. In the early 1790s, a series of pedagogical and educa-
tional reforms that placed a new premium on expertise, research, and
disciplinary specialization further devalued the contributions traditional
Altphilologie made to German intellectual lite. Teachers of Latin and
Greek responded by asserting the exclusive prerogative of philologists
to teach the interpretive skills necessary for the new humanistic sciences
and by forging classical philology into the modern professionalized
field of AltertumSlvissenschaft (classical studies ).1~3
As the following chapters show, classicists quickly lost their
monopoly on the study of language despite the continued prestige of
their textual and historical methods. Experts in ancient Greek and Latin
shied away from the comparative and historical studies that formed the
avant-garde of the language sciences in the nineteenth century. Faith in
the universal aesthetic forms of Greek language and culture kept classi-
cists from embracing a relativist landscape of nations and situating the
Hellenes within the larger "physiognomy of nations" that Herder en-
visioned. Only after the Napoleonic invasions did a younger generation
of Orientalists and Germanists fulfill the historical ambitions he and
Humboldt had for comparative philology.
Constructivist theories of language and the particular perspective
of German idealism informed the empirical agenda of comparative
philology. The field's characteristic veneration of origins and primordial
linguistic forms arose from an attempt to recover the original "idea of
language" in pure form. Fichte and the early Romantics tended to dis-
place historical discussions of the origin of language onto Adam and
Eve and an empirically unverifiable period of human history.IK4 At the
start of the nineteenth century, new empirical techniques promised to
recover that Golden Age when the world's languages most closely ap-

62
 CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES OF LANGUAGE

proximated their underlying, divine idea. Origins retained a generative

capacity and were granted the power of setting the patterns by which
organic structures evolved. The legacy of the late Enlightenment is like-
\\i~c manifest in the constructive role nineteenth -century philologists
attributed to language in the formation of culture and community. Or-
g~lI1ic metaphors continued to credit languages with molding the souls
~nd spirits of national groups.
By 1800, words had come alive in an odd mixture of Protestant
theology and an idealist veneration of the creative, divine idea. Accord-
ing to late eighteenth-century theorists, linguistic forms structured the
p(;ssibilities for self-expression, identity formation, and being in the
\\'odd with slight regard for individual speakers. Wilhelm von Hum-
boldt and his contemporaries had begun to doubt that a truth existed
olltside the structures of language and to investigate whether words
thcmselves did not produce the reality they were intended to represent.
In so doing, these scholars introduced a characteristically conflicted
modern understanding of language. Words were regarded as both the
expression of the subjective will of those who spoke them and as set
pieces in an evolving grammatical grid that structured meaning inde-
pendently of the speaker. Comparative-historical philologists welcomed
this tension between the expressive and constructive aspects of lan-
guage as a dynamic explanation for the formation of national commu-
nities. Later scholars oflanguage would lose their reverence for the past
as they translated a radical historicization oflanguage into an apprecia-
tion of the confines that fixed grammatical structures imposed on a fal-
tering subject.

63
 2
Urheim6f Rsien
German Nationhood and the "Indo-Germanic"
Language Familq, 1770-1830

O n January 11, 1809, the German Orientalist Heinrich Julius von

Klaproth (1783-1835) returned to Saint Petersburg, suffering from
a high fever that had killed his travel companions in the Caucasus
mountains. For over a year, Klaproth and his assistants had plodded
through "deep and unsound snow" to reach remote mountain villages
in the provinces stretching between Baku and the Volga-Don line. The
Russian Academy of Sciences had engaged them to complete a geo-
graphic and ethnographic survey of those northern areas recently
brought under Czar Alexander's control and those further south still
being contested militarily. But the twenty-five-year-old Klaproth was
most interested in taking linguistic samples of the myriad little-known
tongues spoken in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. He was drawn by
the prospect of finding surviving evidence of early Medo-Germans he
believed had once inhabited the Caucasus or traversed the region dur-
ing their prehistoric migrations westward into Europe. Klaproth was
not disappointed. His memoirs recall encountering speakers of the Os-
setian language not far from the Inguri and Terek Rivers. To his delight
the members of this group appeared to use root words similar to those
in German and Farsi and had curiously blue eyes and blond or red hair. I
Based on his findings, Klaproth proposed the term "Indo-Germanic"
111 1823 to designate those tongues and peoples he believed had de-

65
 CHAPTER 2

scended from a common central Asian homeland or Urheimat. 2

Julius Klaproth was one in a long line of German Orientalists
whose linguistic talents served the Russian Empire. His concern for the
prehistoric tics early Germans may have had to the East also exempli-
fies a key preoccupation of nineteenth-century German language schol-
ars. Was the cultural starting point of the German nation to be found
in central Asia? Russian imperial expansion into the Persian and Ot-
toman Empires provided Klaproth with the opportunity to seek first-
hand evidence of Germanic migration across the so-called "bridge of
nations from Asia to Europe. " I His research falls within a tradition of
German language study that aided colonization of the Russian border-
lands. It also points to an overwhelmingly positive national identifica-
tion that German scholars cultivated with central Asia as a possible pri-
mordial homeland. Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism
(1978), there have been numerous attempts to identify an "Orient"
that was the particular preserve of German scholarship and to charac-
terize the relationship between knowledge and power among Oricntal-
ists trained in states without colonies." Early nineteenth-century Ger-
man philologists were particularly interested in central Asia. Their
efforts suggest possible connections between linguistic research and
colonial expansion, but they also highlight the significance of compar-
ative philology for the definition of German nationhood.
This chapter reconstructs the first of three national genealogies
that German language scholars created in the early nineteenth century.
As Klaproth indicates, the Orientalist model of German national origins
relied heavily on perceived linguistic ties between modern German,
Farsi, and Sanskrit. Philologists drew ethnological implications from
the invention of the "Indo-Germanic" language family, tracing lines of
linguistic descent back to a primordial Germanic past. The chapter sug-
gests why words were considered the key to discovering the national
origins and ethnic affiliations of the world's peoples. Orientalist at-
tempts to pinpoint the German Urheimat grew out of a long-standing
desire to locate a terrestrial paradise or Garden of Eden in Asia. The
prospect that the first Germans were migrants from the East drew its
initial authority from traditional biblical narratives of the dispersal of
nations after Babel. Language had been the key to the genealogy of na-
tions otlered in Genesis, and it continued to inform German efforts to
reconstruct new lines of cultural origin and descent in the nineteenth
century.

66
 URHElMAT ASlEN

German Orientalists revised the traditional biblical framework in

which much ethnographic work had been structured to date. Compar-
ative philology enabled a new type of comparative cultural history that
rewrote the genealogical table presented in the Old Testament, ques-
tioning its monogenetic view of human origins and seeking other mod-
els for the emergence of cultural diversity than the story of Genesis.
The chapter begins with a brief account of how biblical scholarship in-
formed comparative-historical philology in the late eighteenth century.
I t then shows how deeply philological narratives of national origin were
embedded in theological debates. The historicization of Indo- Euro-
pean and, especially, Semitic languages had substantial implications for
biblical criticism, as it did for the German national self-understanding.
Only with the gradual institutional separation of linguistics from Ori-
ental philology did religion retreat behind the mask of disinterested
scholarship.

MOSAIC ETHNOLOGY AND THE PERSIAN IMPASSE

Since the writing of the Old Testament and in all the Jewish, Christian,
and Muslim traditions that drew on this source, language has been in-
terpreted as an indication of the genealogical relations among human
communities. Genesis suggests that Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham,
and Japheth, were responsible for spreading the diverse national
tongues across the globe, and for centuries researchers tried to align ex-
isting languages and peoples with biblical figures. Medieval scholars,
for example, compiled lists of thc supposed seventy-two world lan-
guages and aligned them with the seventy-two descendents of Noah's
sons named in Genesis. 5 Thomas Trautmann has aptly described this
tradition of classifYing nations and peoples based on the book of Gen-
esis as "Mosaic ethnology,,,6 and it is within this Christian context that
the German relationship to the East was viewed in the late eighteenth
century. The descriptive study of human communities was tied espe-
cially in this period to the legacy of Georg Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716) and authors of universal history (Universalgeschichte).7
Writing in the political chaos that followed the Thirty Years War,
Leibniz recognized the central role of linguistic homogeneity in the
formation of nations and was a chief advocate of strengthening the
"teutsche Nation" through devotion to the vernacular. As the founder
and first president of the learned society that evolved into the Prussian
Academy of Sciences, Leibniz proposed compiling a comprehensive

67
 CHAPTER 2

historical dictionary of German and its respective dialects. 8 German, he

believed, was equally as ancient as Hebrew and likely, in a more archaic
form, had once reigned over much of Asia and Europe. 9 Leibniz like-
wise demonstrated how the study of individual tongues could be used
to establish genealogical relationships and historical descent among na-
tions. Words, in his view, were "the oldest monuments of peoples" and
"best indicate [d] their origins, kinships and migrations." He himself
classifIed the world's languages into two "species," the northern
Japhetic family and the Aramaic of the south; he was the fIrst to suspect
historical ties between Finnish and Hungarian and to use archaic river
and place names in tracing the migrations of peoples, especially the
Basques. 10
Leibniz's linguistic initiative directly inspired the emergence of
ethnology as a field in late eighteenth-century Germany. In 1713 he
had written to Peter the Great encouraging him to survey the many
non-European languages found in the expanding Russian Empire. Half
a century later, the Gottingen Orientalist and historian August Ludwig
Schlozer (1735-1809) undertook to classify the peoples inhabiting the
region that stretched from Iceland to Kamchatka based on the word
lists that the German scholars had subsequently assembled in the reign
of Catherine the Great. His General History of the North (1771) coined
the terms" Ethnographic" and" Volkcrkundc" and explained how Leib-
niz's proposition "to infer from uniformities in language and descent .
. . that nations share in the same customs and fate" made possible a new
"science of peoples": "In this I consult no history or travel books,
rather I examine the languages themselves based on the available gram-
mars, dictionaries, and Bible translations .... Then I classify these lan-
guages according to the main tongues and vernaculars and determine
from them classes of people along with their subdivisions." I I On the
basis of language, Schlozer believed he had identifIed the fIve main
peoples living west of the Ural mountains (Finns, Latvians, Slavs, Ger-
mans, and Samoyeds) and the twenty-two primary linguistic groups of
the Asian north.
Schlozer's work is significant for the priority it assigned to lan-
guage in the identification of ethnic groups. He outlined three defin-
ing features that helped constitute a Volk: geographical proximity, com-
mon descent, and membership in a political community; all were
"derived from the use oflanguage whose force neither history nor phi-
losophy can overcome.,,12 But Schlozer lacked a sufficiently historical

68
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

view of language that might have enabled him to turn his essentially
static or Linnaean system of northern peoples into a historicizing nar-
rative of common descent. As soon as he integrated linguistic commu-
nities into larger historical continuities, Schlozer ceased to regard them
on their own terms, characterizing peoples solely based on their posi-
tion within the progress and development of "the human species" in its
totality.13 Although he longed to reconstruct a genealogy of peoples
that led from Adam and the Old Testament to the current inhabitants
of the north, Schlozer feared that the necessary "middle links" between
languages spoken by followers of Noah's sons and his own subjects
could never be recovered. 14 Until the nineteenth century, etymology
was largely a speculative science. Comparativists lacked adequate tools
for bridging the historical distance between recorded languages and
those prehistoric tongues alluded to in the Jewish Bible.
Nevertheless, Europeans speculated on the likely location of the
Carden of Eden. The philosophical cultural histories oflate Enlighten-
ment scholars such as J. G. Herder presumed central Asia, specifically
the region around Kashmir, to be the cradle of humanity and by exten-
sion the ultimate point of origin of all Europeans. ls The German con-
nection to central Asia could not be confirmed by concrete historical or
linguistic evidence, however. In the late eighteenth century, genealo-
gies of language aimed primarily at identifYing the relative progress
with which individual idioms allowed for the exercise of reason and not
at reconstructing the history of human communities. lo Even those
scholars with a historical interest in language, such as the preeminent
German comparativist Johann Christoph Adelung (1732-1806), had
to conclude that "Noah's ark is a sealed bastion, and the ruins of Baby-
Ion lie still before me."l? The gap between languages of historical
record and the time of Babel was impassable without methods for re-
constructing prehistoric linguistic states. Late eighteenth-century com-
parativists could only trace the actual ancestry of modern Germans as
far east and "back in time" as Iran.
As the lingua franca of south and central Asia and the language in
which East India Company officials were trained, Farsi was well known
to European scholars, and its connections to German were readily ap-
parcnt. IH Scholars intrigued by possible German ties to the East thus fo-
cused on the similarities between their mother tongue and Farsi, draw-
ing on a tradition of language comparison that dated to the sixteenth
century and relied primarily on lexical items. 19 Similar sounding words

69
 CHAPTER 2

in German and Farsi (such as Bruder und baradar) could be shown to

have equivalent meanings (in this case, "brother"), from which the re-
searcher could conclude that the two languages were related. This ap-
proach to comparative linguistics invested instances of lexical conver-
gence with genealogical significance but without sophisticated
mechanisms for tracing lineage or linking such ties to affinities in the
collective consciousness of speakers.
Addung's Ancient History of the Germans (1806) explored the
German-Farsi connection in depth, concluding that similarities be-
tween the root syllables of the two tongues were so compelling that
they could not be explained by borrowing or mixing but only by "an
original derivation" of the languages and peoples from each other. 20 In
his view, the Goths had enjoyed a "long sojourn" on the Black Sea
from where they had penetrated parts of Iran and lived in close prox-
imity with its inhabitants. These tribes adopted so much of the local
language that, according to Adelung, German must be seen as a "very
deteriorated descendent of Parsi, the original language of the southern
provinces. ,,21 Notably, Addung refused to pinpoint the exact location
in Asia from which the Goths had swept into Iran, leaving open the
question of the ultimate origins of Germans and humankind. He rec-
ognized the great age of Sanskrit but neglected to connect it directly to
German, grouping ancient Indic together with such unrelated lan-
guages as Hebrew, Syrian, and Turkish. 22 Adelung later speculated that
the cradle of civilization where "the honorable ancestors of all ... peo-
ples and languages" once resided likely lay somewhere in the eastern
part of Kashmir, near Tibet. This region he described as an Asian "par-
adise" akin to the Garden of Eden: the first human couple was at home
here, and the most simple monosyllabic languages from which all oth-
ers derived flourished in its protective embraces. 23 But Addung could
not connect Farsi to the language of Adam.
It was a better understanding of how to reconstruct archaic states
of a language as a basis for determining the proximity of linguistic
groups that enabled Sir William Jones to see connections between San-
skrit, Slavic, German, and the classical European tongues in 1786. His
"discovery" of the Indo-European language family is often depicted as
a decisive break from speculative biblical narrative, but his realization
that Farsi was related to ancient Indic initially did little more than bring
European scholars closer to Eden and push European ancestry deeper
into Asia. In his presidential address to the Royal Asiatick Society of

70
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

Bengal, Jones observed that Sanskrit bore to Greek and Latin "a
stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar,
than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed
that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing
them to have sprung from some common source.,,24 These words inau-
gurated modern scientific philological discourse. Jones demonstrated
the greater reliability of grammatical rather than lexical comparisons
and identified most major branches of what became known as the Indo-
European language family; he also suspected the existence of a common
mother tongue, more ancient than Sanskrit itselt~ which has now been
reconstructed as Proto-Indo- European.
In its eighteenth-century form, however, the Indo-European the-
sis was little more than an attempt to practice Mosaic ethnology. Jones
was reluctant to consider himself a linguist per se and never questioned
the premodern assumption that language was a perfectible instrument
of knowledge and not an object of study itself. His comparisons were
intended to show the common origin of what was believed to be the
tlve main Asian nations (Persia, Chaldea, Turkey, India, and China) and
ultimately to recover the lost common language of Noah and Adam.
For this reason he included the unrelated languages of Egypt, China,
Japan, Java, and Myanmar, as well as those of the Incas and Aztecs, in
the same family as Sanskrit. Indeed, it was the possibility raised by the
mythologist Jacob Byrant that Greeks and Indians were related to
Egyptians as common descendents of Ham (not Japheth) that allowed
Jones to see ties across the family. He never intended to separate Indo-
European and Semitic languages and only inadvertently discovered that
Sanskrit bore no resemblances in words or structures to Arabic. 25 Nev-
ertheless, Jones's approach to etymology and historical grammar
opened a new avenue for reconstructing the early history of languages
and peoples that could theoretically reach back to Babel while challeng-
ing the genealogical table of the Pentateuch on purely linguistic au-
thority.

BEFORE BABEL: INDIA AND THE

ROMANTIC SEARCH FOR ORIGINS

Nineteenth -century German scholars ofIndo-European languages owe

a great debt to William Jones, but the popularity of the comparative
method is due largely to German efforts. German Indologists quickly
surpassed their British colleagues in both the quality and quantity of

71
 CHAPTER 2

their scholarship.26 Until Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) advocated

instruction in Sanskrit for civil service candidates, British universities
neglected the Held. Colonists tended to agree with Thomas Babington
Macaulay's remark to parliament in 1835 that a single row of books in
a European library was more valuable than Asian literature in its en-
tirety. The eager reception of comparative philology in Germany and its
rapid decline across the channel can be attributed to more than the
sobering effects of Britain's colonial encounter, however. Differing
conceptions of language and its perceived role in defIning human com-
munities were a factor as well. The legacy of the language theorist
Horne Tooke rendered British scholars indifferent to the comparative-
historical techniques introduced by Jones. Until 1830 British scholars
persisted in regarding language as a reflection of the rational structures
of the human mind. 27
J. G. Herder and his mentor, J. G. Hamann, were seminal figures
in the transfer of Indian studies from Britain to Germany. In the last
decade of the eighteenth century, Georg Foster (1754-94) and
friedrich Majer (1772-1818) published the fIrst German renditions of
the Sanskrit works Jones had translated into English. Fascinated by the
religious and philosophical teachings of the Brahmans, especially as
found in the mythology of the Law Book of Manu, these two intro-
duced Herder, J. W. von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller to the Sakun-
tala. Herder's commentaries on the drama set the template for the
mythical image of India that long fascinated the Romantics. 2B Before
this time, however, Hamann and Herder had already introduced the
early Romantics to the notion that the first languages and human com-
munities had developed in India. 2~ In their view, the poetic forms of
Eastern languages recalled the divine word of revelation and contained
hidden religious symbolism. Knowledge of Sanskrit promised to unlock
the mysteries of a primordial and deeply authentic mythology.
The geographic reorientation of German Orientalists toward India
did not eliminate interest in Tran. Well into the 1820s, a nllmber ofGer-
man Orientalists still viewed Avestan (or Zend, the ancient Iranian lan-
guage of the sacred Zoroastrian books) as the Ursprache from which
modern German derived. Before his "conversion" to Sanskrit, the then
professor of philosophy in Bamburg Othmar Frank (1770-1840) found
"the light of primordial German nationality still burning" in the ancient
religious teachings of Iran. His works On the Persian Language and its
Origins (1806) and The Light from the Orient (1808) recommended

72
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

founding a "Philosophical-Persian Academy" in Germany, dedicated to

the "oldest wisdom of the Orient and the German nation. ,,30 Heinrich
friedrich Link (1767-1851) argued that Avestan was the mother of
Sanskrit and of all languages related to it, concluding in 1821 that the
earliest Germans had once inhabited the mountains of Media, Armenia,
and Georgia:'1 Bernhard Dorn (1805-81) likewise followed Adelung in
emphasizing the German-Farsi connection. 32
Ancient India began to eclipse the importance of Iran within the
cultural imagination of nineteenth-century Germans after the publica-
tion of Friedrich Schlegel's On the Language and Wisdom of the Indi-
ans ( 1808). Schlegel believed that he had finally pinpointed the actual
location of the elusive terrestrial paradise that Adelung and Herder had
cautiously placed in Kashmir. The craze for India that developed
among the German Romantics relates to this, as well as to a growing
disillusionment with what was perceived as a rational and mechanical
post- Enlightenment European culture. 13 Schlegel hoped to reverse the
apparent degeneration of Christianity in the modern world by return-
ing to "the source of all languages, all thought, and all poetry of the
human spirit. ,,34 Inspired by the work of Sir William Jones, Schlegel had
traveled to Paris in 1802 where he was introduced to Farsi by Antoine-
Leonard de Chezy and received private lessons in Sanskrit from Alexan-
der Hamilton, an English marine officer who was the only one on the
continent who knew the language. Previous work in comparative In-
dian, Greek, and Germanic mythology had led Schlegel to expect he
would find evidence of a primordial religion (Urreligion) in India
whose principles would reconcile apparent deviations in the diversity of
later accounts of the divine.
On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians falls at a transitional
moment in Schlegel's development. In the year of its publication he
converted to Catholicism, repudiated his early Romantic sympathies for
pantheism, and joined Metternich's imperial court, where he embraced
conservative, pro-Austrian German nationalism:'s The text thus reflects
an odd mixture of Catholic apologetics and nationalist ambitions.
Schlegel's search for the divine in India aimed to reverse the process of
rationalizing religion and naturalizing God that supposedly began with
the Protestant Reformation. 36 In his view, ancient Indians had pre-
served traces of original revelation, but the force of reason within In-
dian religion and philosophy had wildly distorted God's word until it
culminated in pantheism. 37 By equating the pantheism of ancient India

73
 CHAPTER 2

with that pantheism of which contemporary Protestant theology was

accused after the Spinoza controversy, On the Language and Wisdom of
the Indians upheld Catholicism as the religion maintaining the truest
ties to original revelation. Recourse to India likewise allowed Schlegel
to resuscitate the ancient Germanic tribes as worthy rivals of the classi-
cal Greeks, rather than primitive, nomadic inhabitants of the northern
forests.'lH For Schlegel not only revered India as the original source of
religious inspiration. He suspected India to be the most likely
Urheimat of Germans in Asia and oftered evidence in his work that the
earliest German speakers had migrated westward from this land. His
joint association of India with divine revelation and the German home-
land set a precedent for sacralizing the nation and for regarding Ger-
man speakers as a people chosen by God.
The narrative of German descent from India that Schlegel elabo-
rated in the book's third section, titled "Historical Ideas," followed tra-
ditional biblical notions of the emergence of cultural difference. By this
account, German speakers and related linguistic groups originated from
a sacred homeland in the East that had also been the site of the "first
revelation." Humanity had experienced its first religious awakening and
been introduced to the idea of the true God in a terrestrial Indian par-
adise. Sanskrit, in Schlegel's analysis, was the "oldest descendent," the
most proximate historical language of the lost "Ursprache" or divine
first language of revelation. 39 At the same time, Schlegel drew on affini-
ties in language, mythology, law, and architecture to conclude that "the
greatest empires and most noble nations" of antiquity, including the
Egyptians and Hebrews, were "colonies" founded by Indian priests.
He distinguished the t1rst Germans as one of several "descended na-
tions" or emigrant groups, including the Persians, who had left Asia
during a period of religious strife and civil war that followed disagree-
ment over the meaning of God's word. In his analysis, religious motives
compelled the Germanic tribes to leave Turkistan along the Gihon for
the north side of the Caspian Sea, from where they crossed the Cauca-
sus and headed north into Scandinavia. 40 Only later did a second wave
of migration found the civilizations of Greece and Rome. 1l
Schlegel, however, altered the Christian narrative of Asian de-
scent by claiming only one people to have been witness to God's word.
In 1808 he contrasted those populations whose languages pointed to
a "common descent" from Sanskrit with those for whom "no original
kinship" could be determined. In his view, Latin, Greek, Farsi, and

74
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

German could all be "derived from Indic and understood based on her
composition." He based this assumption initially on the affinity of root
words common to them all, such as the names for mother, father,
brother, and sister, but extended his analysis into their "innermost
structure and grammar," suggesting that "comparative grammar"
promised new insights into the genealogy of languages. 42 Schlegel dis-
cerned that the above idioms followed a similar "structural law" ac-
cording to which grammatical relationships were expressed within a
sentence. He detected in all "a shared principle by which all relation-
ships and subtleties of meaning are signified not by appended particles
or helping verbs, but rather by inflection, that is by modification to the
root." In other words, those languages that derived from Sanskrit were
united by their common use of changes to the roots of words to sig-
nifY grammatical functions such as number or tense. In his analysis,
Sanskrit and its cognates were "organic" and flexional; the root was a
"Jiving seed" that expressed its grammatical function through "inner
change. ,,4.,
The conglomeration of languages to which Schlegel attributed
Indian origins was set apart from a more varied second group, includ-
ing Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, and American Indian languages, that had
a "diametrically opposed grammar." He characterized these lesser
tongues as "mechanical" rather than "organic" because they made use
"only of affixa rather than inflection" and expressed grammatical rela-
tionships with the help of an "added word. ,,44 Schlegel denied that in-
tlectional forms could have been obtained by affixing previously inde-
pendent words; thus these types were radically incommensurate. This
second group supposedly evolved from the languages of primitive "na-
tives" (Urbewohner) who lived in areas outside of India and had not
been privileged by the word of God, developing their speech instead
from simple cries and sounds found in nature. These "wilder peoples,"
in his view, tended to be "isolated" and "uncultivated" and had con-
tributed little to the "moral development" of humanity.45
In his Lectures on Universal History (1805-6), Schlegel had based
this hierarchical distinction on a polygenetic view of human origins;
only the "honorable" and "cultured" nations of Asia and Europe were
said to have their roots in India. 46 Having resolved to convert to
Catholicism while writing his 1808 essay on India, Schlegel later asso-
ciated this division of humanity with the biblical story of Cain and
Abel. 47 Explaining human "degeneration" through the metaphor of a

75
 CHAPTER 2

fallen brother enabled the author to reconcile his distinction between

cultured and barbaric peoples with a monogenetic Christian philosophy
of history.4H It also allowed Schlegel to privilege German speakers as a
chosen people destined to recreate the lost religious knowledge of di-
vine revelation following an enlightened return to the paradise from
which they had been expelled. Significantly, he believed the first Ger-
mans had left India in search of the holy mountain Meru, celebrated in
ancient legend, and were drawn toward Scandinavia by "a wonderful
notion of the great dignity and splendor of the north. ,,49
Schlegel's admonition that further research into Indian antiquity
was "very important for our fatherland" invited scholars with more di-
rectly nationalist concerns to turn eastward. 50 His work initially had a
mixed reception during the Napoleonic period due to his conservative
nationalism. sl But it found a host of welcome readers among Bavarians,
including Othmar Frank (1770-1840), Franz Bopp (1791-1867), and
the poet-Orientalist Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866). Riickert, in par-
ticular, followed Schlegel in associating India jointly with the origins of
the German nation and with a Golden Age before Babel in which the
divine had been revealed in language. The celebrated author of the pa-
triotic Fiery Sonnets ( 1814) reworked Schlegel's expectations of finding
religious revival in the East into salvationist national narratives that
promised the resurrection of spiritual harmony as the basis of German
national unity. This fusion of Christian and national narratives resulted
in an enduring conception of German national culture that anticipated
a kind of millenarian fulfillment in which German speakers emerged as
a people chosen by God.

COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR: FRANZ Bopp

Comparative philology as a field distinct from the Romantic longing for
India emerged under the auspices of Franz Bopp, the first Professor of
General Linguistics and Oriental Literature in Berlin. Bopp established
comparative grammar as a distinct school within German Indological
scholarship, separate from textual analysis and historical criticism, as
well as from the comparative study of religion. As such, his career marks
the initial separation of linguistics from other philologies and theology.
The conditions of his appointment relieved Bopp from teaching exege-
sis of the Holy Scriptures; in tact, Bopp was given preference over an
incumbent theologian who was already teaching Sanskrit in Berlin.
That linguistics took root as a secular science in Prussia reflects the ex-

76
 UR HElMA T ASlEN

tent Wilhelm von Humboldt had already emancipated philology from

theology and helped secularize academics. 52 In this capacity, Bopp his-
toricized Sanskrit as one of several natural tongues that had descended
from an unknown, more ancient mother. Nevertheless, the Romantic
quest for the Indo- European Ursprache and Urheimat maintained a
spell over the field until the 1870s; only then did comparative philolo-
gists who did not specialize in Sanskrit receive chairs in generallinguis-
tics. 5~ The salvationist rhetoric and millenarian expectations introduced
by Friedrich Schlegel continued to shape notions of German descent
from Asia even as they were enshrined in scientific terms.
Bopp's own path to comparative philology reflects a broader re-
orientation of Indology from Catholic-Romantic apologetics to En-
lightenment trends in the human sciences, especially in relation to
Humboldt. 54 Born a Catholic in Mainz in 1791, Franz Bopp was the
youngest son of six children, his father a civil servant at the court of
Elector Friedrich Karl von Ertha!' When French revolutionary troops
captured the city, the Bopp family fled with the government to Aschaf-
fen burg. Several faculties of the local university likewise transferred, so
that Bopp was able to attend Karl Joseph Windisch mann 's lectures on
philosophy and natural history. A follower ofF. W. J. Schelling, Windis-
chmann combined an interest in mysticism and aesthetics with a fasci-
nation for the languages and literatures of the East. Like Friedrich
Schlegel, J. J. Garres, and G. F. Creuzer, Windischmann was full of en-
thusiasm for Indian wisdom and philosophy, and he imparted this to an
eager Franz Bopp.55
Bopp initially squeezed enough support from the Bavarian
Academy of Sciences to pursue Sanskrit studies abroad. From 1812 to
1815, he resided in Paris, enjoying the company of Sylvestre de Sacy,
A. L. Chezy, L. M. Langles, and Alexander Hamilton. Here Bopp ded-
icated himself to studying and translating the Indian epics Bhagavad
Gita) Ramayana) and Mahabharata. His ambition was to translate the
Vedas so that he might uncover hidden truths behind Indian myths. "I
will later free myself from the myths and contemplate pure truth,"
Bapp wrote, "Indeed, these myths, honorable poetry, are not without
real, philosophical value. The truth is shrouded in them so that they do
not blind the profane. ,,56 Shortly before the publication of On the Con-
jugation System of Sanskrit (1816), Bopp shifted his attention from
myth and philosophy to language itself. In a letter to Windischmann,
he explained that he intended to "make the study of language philo-

77
Franz Bopp, professor of general linguistics and Orient,ll literature in Berlin,
demurely displaying the Order Pour Ie Merite for Seimces and Arts
that King Friedrich Wilhelm IV bestowed upon him in 1842
as a member of the fIrst civilian class.
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

sophical and historical and not to be satisfied with understanding what

is written in a language.,,57 Schlegel advised comparing the grammati-
cal structures of languages rather than just items of shared vocabulary,
and Bopp discovered that investigating verb conjugation systems was
more rewarding than studying declension. 58
Grammar proved to be the intellectual bedrock upon which the
emerging field of comparative-historical philology rested. Bopp as-
serted that every language had an internal mechanism of growth that
determined its evolution over time and space. Borrowing terminology
tram botany and comparative anatomy, he characterized languages as
"organic, natural bodies formed according to definite laws, having a
life-giving principle within; they develop and gradually die out after los-
ing consciousness of their true nature and throwing aside or mutilating
or misusing ... their members or forms. ,,59 One could construct a ge-
nealogy of languages by identifYing this "linguistic organism" (Spra-
chorgan ism us) , discovering its original form, and comparing it to oth-
ers. 60 Bopp ascribed mental activity to language as if it were an
independent thinking being. Language also assumed a life ofits own in
his hands, posing to later scholars the question of whether historical
change was regulated by autonomous inner laws or external interven-
ing factors. He likewise assumed scholars encountered language already
in a state of decline and mutilation. 61 This view encouraged a concern
tor prehistoric states of linguistic development and a reverence for the
supposed youth, vitality, and purity of language.
On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit demonstrated how similar-
ities in the verb conjugation patterns of Greek, Latin, German, and
Farsi could be used to prove that the languages in question were related
and of shared historical origin. Here Bopp adopted Schlegel's notion of
inflection, but denied that Sanskrit was the oldest tongue in the family:
"in all languages that descend from Sanskrit or with it from a common
mother, no grammatical relationship is expressed through an inflection
not shared with this original language [Ursprache].,,62 The "truly or-
ganic way" in which Indo-European verbs inflected and took shape in
a sentence was not, according to Bopp, replicated in other families such
as Semitic or Chinese.1>3 He showed that the root form of the verb in
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, and Farsi underwent a similar series of
modifications or inflections when conjugated in a sentence. The inflec-
tion of a verb determines its grammatical function by assigning num-
ber, tense, voice, and mood to the root. In the verb "to eat," for exam-

79
 CHAPTER 2

pIe, the past tense "ate" is formed or inflected by a change in the ini-
tial vowel of the stem; the third person singular, indicative, present
tense ("eats") is formed by appending the inflection "-s" to the stem.64
Bopp discovered that "as in the conjugation of ancient Indic verbs,"
the grammatical relationships in all related languages "are expressed
through corresponding modifications to the roots. ,,65 Without detailing
these modifications, suffice it to say that the success of his comparative
method derived in part from the frequency and precision of the agree-
ment among Indo- European languages in the particulars of their mor-
phology.M
Bopp's ability to convince contemporaries of the basic structural
identity ofIndo- European languages was also a result of his not follow-
ing the Indic grammatical tradition in his treatment of Sanskrit. He dis-
associated what he saw as the essential structure of the language from
the system presented in native and missionary grammars he encoun-
tered in Paris."? The structure of Sanskrit could only be made visible, in
his mind, by transferring to it the apparatus of Greek grammar. This
move made Bopp's work accessible to a broad range of European-
trained scholars. The fact that his study drew exclusively on two English
grammars of Sanskrit and he neglected to conduct independent re-
search in ancient texts was later criticized by a rival school of more
philologically traditional Indologists in Bonn who branded Bopp "a
Grimm without Ulphilas. ,,68 Bopp's lack of formal university training
generally made him a ready target for colleagues who feared Oriental
studies would not earn adequate recognition within the neohumanist
universities.
In 1816, Bopp unsuccessfully sought academic employment in
Bavaria. Crown Prince Ludwig instead bestowed five hundred gulden
on him for a research trip to London, where Bopp became acquainted
with Sir Charles Wilkins and H. T. Colcbrooke. Bopp also met and gave
Sanskrit lessons to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was then Prussian am-
bassador to the court of Saint James. During this time, Bopp continued
to publish critical editions and Latin translations of episodes from the
Mahabharata, including Nala and Damayanti (1819). He also pub-
lished an "Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and
Teutonic Languages" in the Annals of Oriental Literature (1820),
which extended to all parts of grammar what his first book had done to
the verb alone. As Peter K. J. Park has shown, this essay marks a grad-
ual distancing of Bopp from both Schlegel's scholarly precepts and his

80
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

OWI1 Catholicism. 69 Based on a new understanding of verbal and pro-

nominal roots, Bopp denied that Indo-European languages displayed
ill flection as their dominant principle. In his view, original Indo-Euro-
pean roots had been monosyllabic and thus incapable of inward inflec-
tion and alteration; they relied on foreign additions to express gram-
matical notions. Within Sanskrit, the only possible forms of inflection in
Schlegel's sense were certain vowel changes and reduplication. 70
Despite these achievements, Bopp was denied the first German
post in Indology that opened at the newly founded University of Bonn.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich's older brother, received this honor
in 1818. 71 A. W. Schlegel only came to Sanskrit studies at the age of
tixry-eight, and it was Bopp who instructed him in Paris. However,
Schlegel's classical training in G6ttingen under C. G. Heyne and his
promise to apply "the principles of classical philology" to Sanskrit liter-
attIre "and indeed with the most scientific of precision," made him the
more attractive candidate. 72 Under his leadership Bonn emerged as the
center of research on the literature, history, art, religion, and philoso-
phy of India, drawing such renowned students as Christian Lassen and
Heinrich Heine. Schlegel's critical editions of Sanskrit texts and his im-
peccable Latin translations and commentaries garnered the respect of
classical philologists, the most notable of these being his Bhagavad-
Gita (1823) and selections from the Ramayana (1829-38). He harshly
criticized Franz Bopp for his faulty Latin and his errors in issuing frag-
mentary, rather than intact, segments of Indian epics. n By the 1830s
Sanskrit studies were divided into two mutually opposing schools of
Berlin linguists and Bonn philologists.?4
Bopp lacked the prestige of more traditional, literary philologists.
He also departed from the mold of the typical German Orientalist who
served theological faculties. Thus, in 1820 the University ofWurzburg
denied him a post as an Orientalist. The theologians there declared they
needed no additional instructors in Oriental languages; one Professor
K. J. Fischer already offered Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic. The
philosophical faculty added that Sanskrit was a "literary luxury." In-
struction in Sanskrit and Farsi was appropriate for "capital cities and
academies" and had no place at a provincial university.?' Only through
the assistance of Wilhelm von Humboldt did Bopp obtain a position at
the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In 1821 he was appointed
to a chair in Comparative Grammar and Oriental Literature, and one
year later he was elected a member of the Royal Prussian Academy.

81
 CHAPTER 2

Bopp rarely applied his theories of linguistic relations to the cul-

tural history of the groups that spoke them. Nor was he interested in
speculating on the philosophical significance of Indo-European gram-
matical forms. 76 Subsequent linguists have even criticized Bopp for a
lack of methodology: his work did not offer a theory or systematic
method for linguistic science.?? Rather, Bopp's empirical studies
grouped languages into families by isolating their dominant linguistic
principles and then tracing these back to a few distinct points of origin.
He was particularly interested in the "organism" shared by what he re-
ferred to as the "Indo-Classical" languages, researching not only the
"physical and mechanical laws" that united them, but also speculating
on the "origins of the forms that signifY grammatical relationships. ,,78
This was the main preoccupation of the Comparative Grammar of the
Sanskrit) Zend) Greek) Latin) Lithuanian) Gothic) German) and Slavonic
Languages (1833-52). Here Bopp defined as inorganic all grammatical
principles that could not be derived from the original structures of
Indo- European languages, detaching the term completely from its as-
sociation with inflection. 79
The tripartite division of languages presented in the Comparative
Grammar confirmed Bopp's repudiation of Friedrich Schlegel's tute-
lage. Languages in the first class of Bopp's scheme, including Chinese,
were "without proper roots and the capacity for compositions and
hence without organism, without grammar. "so Indo- European tongues
and all others that did not fit into classes one or three were character-
ized by monosyllabic roots capable of composition. According to
Bopp, they "create their organism, their grammar almost exclusively"
through composition. The third class made up of the Semitic languages
had disyllabic verb roots with three consonants; languages of this type
created grammatical forms both through composition and "inner mod-
ification of the root. ,,81 Bopp justified his classification of Semitic
tongues as inflectional by the fact that they "indicated subordinate
grammatical notions through the mere inner transformation of roots."
By contrast, the roots of Indo-European languages formed "an almost
unchangeable, sealed kernel that surrounded itself with foreign sylla-
bles ... whose function is to express subordinate grammatical notions,
which the roots themselves cannot express." The vowel(s) found in
Indo- European roots formed part of the base meaning and could only
be lengthened or intensified, a process that did not signifY grammatical
relationships.B2 Here Bopp recognized reduplication, or the repetition

82
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

--
ot
· radical consonants, as the only inflectional form originally found in
Indo-European roots.
83

This reclassification of languages did not alter the high esteem in

which Bopp held the original forms of Indo-European tongues, nor his
differentiating them fundamentally from those of Semitic languages.
The "great advantage" the Indo-European family held over the Semitic
lav, f{)r Bopp, in the "richness of the grammatically truly significant
. ~ . attachments" appended to their roots: "in the reflective, meaning-
ful selection and use of these, and the precise and clear designation of
the most varied relationships made possible by them; finally in the
beautiful integration of these attachments to a harmonious whole that
resembles an organic body. ,,84 Bopp never challenged the monogenetic
origins of humankind, although his typology may have encouraged
polygcnccism in Bopp's students, such as F. A. Pott. As Bopp explained
to the Berlin Academy in 1823, he followed the theologian Wilhelm
Gescnius in accepting the possibility that the current condition of
Semitic roots "could have evolved from an earlier period" when the law
of disyllabic roots had not yet been established. 8s The plausibility of this
early affinity was heatedly debated throughout the nineteenth century.
The rival Indologists in Bonn mounted a feeble attempt to reverse
Bopp's classificatory scheme. Compelled to defend the family honor
ana the organic interpretation of inflection upon which Bopp's theory
quickly gained, A. W. Schlegel planned (but never completed) his own
comparative grammar. As an insult of sorts, his student Christian
Lassen labeled Bopp's notion that composition was the origin of in-
tlecting forms in Indo-European agglutination or composition theory.
However, their efforts could offer nothing positive to replace Bopp's
typology. Schlegel and Lassen's opposition was gradually forgotten,
leaving Bopp in undisputed possession of the new field in comparative
grammar. 86 His followers were left to supplement and make more pre-
cise Bopp's principles of comparison, while fleshing out the cultural
and philosophical implications of his work.

THE FIRST INDO-GERMANS: JULIUS KLAPROTH

Denying that any of the presumed Ursprachen (Sanskrit, Avestan, an-

cient Greek, or Hebrew) was the truly most ancient mother tongue
complicated the search for the exact geographical location of the Indo-
European homeland in Asia. Following William Jones and Franz Bopp,
German Orientalists searched for a new Asian homeland outside of

83
 CHAPTER 2

India where presumably the common ancestors of all Indo- European

speakers had resided. Some language scholars literally traveled east on
a quest to identifY the linguistic communities from which modern Ger-
mans descended and to which they were related by exclusive ethnic and
cultural ties. They spatialized and territorialized Schlegel's narrative of
expulsion from paradise as they mapped Ollt the likely location of this
Urheimat and identified the migration roots the first Germanic tribes
reputedly took from central Asia into Europe.
The first comparativist to situate the German homeland outside of
India and to map out the early ditlusion of linguistic groups in central
Asia was Julius Klaproth (1783-1835). His extensive comparisons of
Asian and European languages were based almost exclusively on the
correspondence of root words and meanings, and they only superfi-
cially took account of grammatical structure. For this reason, his con-
tributions to the carly history of Indo- European linguistics have been
undervalued by disciplinary historians. In 1832 August Friedrich Pott
criticized Klaproth's comparative charts as "a shabby last resort, ... by
which only insufficient, often very misleading conclusions about lin-
guistic relations can be drawn. ,,87 His combative personality and the
scandals associated with Klaproth also distanced him from the profes-
sion. Klaproth was rumored to have left Saint Petersburg in haste under
suspicion of having stolen valuable manuscripts from the local library in
1810; later in Paris he was suspected of being a Pruss ian spy.8H Despite
his maverick status, Klaproth's term "Indo-Germanic" was widely ac-
cepted as the German-language designation for the extended family of
languages and peoples he, Bopp, and others perceived to be united by
linguistic ties and a common early history.x'! He had a founding role in
the study of central and cast Asian languages, helping to edit the Fund-
gruben des Orients and the Journal asiatique. In 1811 Friedrich Wil-
helm III appointed K.laproth professor of Asian languages and litera-
tures in Bonn, paid his salary, and supported the publication of his
works, although Klaproth resided in Paris from 1815 until his early
death in 1835.
Asia POZ1LIJ!otta (1823), Klaproth's major work, laid out a compre-
hensive "system of Asian peoples and languages" that purportedly es-
tablished the linguistic and historical relations among more than fifty
Asian tongues and offered a new explanation for the dispersal of so-
called lndo-Germanen. His narrative rejected the story of Babel as an
explanation for cultural diversity but persisted in assigning a pivotal role

84
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

T he adventurous Julius Klaproth preferred the term indogermanisch

over Indo-European . (Courtesy Brown University Library)

to the biblical talc of the flood in its conception of human prehistory.

In Klaproth's view similar sounding words with equivalent meanings
could be found in the languages of the most diverse, unrelated peoples.
This "general" linguistic correspondence resulted from the partial sur-
vival of remnants from an Ursprache that had survived the flood. Of
greater interest to Klaproth, however, were similarities among lan-

85
 .\SL\
I'O.L )"GLOTT.\

.J. JO:),.\'PItOTD
,112:; .

(, S
<I-

The linguistic atlas

Julius K1aproth
appended to Asia
Polyglotta ( 1823 ),
mapping the language
families of central
 UR HElMA T ASIEN

guages of groups whose affinity was also documented "through history

or physical uniformity. ,,90
In making this distinction, Klaproth pushed the original division
of the first mother tongue back into a period of prehistory inaccessible
to philologists and effectively adopted a polygenetic model for explain-
ing the origin of linguistic diversity. The spread of distinct national
tribes and language families across the globe, he claimed, was antedilu-
vian. When high waters covered the earth, certain individuals had
flHlI1d refuge on the mountain peaks of India and America, as well as
011 Mount Ararat, and had independently preserved elements of their
unique languages. These survivors formed the core of the "main tribes"
(StammvOlker), their languages the basis of the "core languages"
(Stammsprachen) from which Klaproth derived thirteen separate lan-
guage tamilies, naming the mountain peaks from which their earliest
speakers likely descended. According to Klaproth's scheme, early speak-
ers of "Indo-Germanic" had migrated into the plains of Europe and
into southern Asia from two separate mountain chains, the Himalayas
and the Caucasus, a fact that explained the physical differences among
the family's speakers. Ancient Indians, he believed, had traveled south
from the Himalayas and quickly mixed with "brown or Negro-like na-
tives" who themselves had retreated to the hills of Malabar. The Goths,
on the other hand, left the Himalayas for the north and entered Europe
through Scandinavia. The other Germanic tribes (Medo-Germans) had
wandered from the Caucasus to the shores of the Caspian Sea, through
Persia and into Europe from the south. 91
Klaproth's findings had the result of relocating the geographical
origins of the German nation from the Ganges, as specified by Schlegel
and Rlickert, to the northern Himalayas and the Caucasus. It was "ab-
surd," Klaproth insisted, to derive "the German people [das deutsche
Volk] from the Hindu" since both nations grew independently out of a
tCw surviving speakers of Indo-Germanic. 92 At the latest, speakers of
Sanskrit, he believed, had lost contact with the European branch of the
Indo-Germanic language family "on the meridonal slopes of the Hi-
malayas," a conclusion supported by the tact that the birch was the only
tree whose name was shared by all members of the family. Sanskrit
names for trees growing in more southern, Indian climates had been
borrowed from unrelated languages native to the south of the subcon-
tinent."·l
Subsequent comparativists concurred with his interpretation. In

87
 CHAPTER 2

an 1840 entry on the Indo-Germanic language family in Ersch and

Gruber's encyclopedia, August Friedrich Port reported scholarly con-
sensus that the mountainous region that is the source of the Amu-
Darya and Syrdarya rivers in central Asia was the German Urheimat. 94
This change made the prospect of an Asian homeland more attractive
by disassociating Proto-Germans from the colonial subjects of India, as
well as from the mystical visions of the early Romantics and controver-
sial mythologists such as Friedrich Creuzer. It also had the advantage
of distancing the first German migrants from the "black natives" of
India whose languages had displaced Indo-European elements. The
first Germans did not originate in India but in an exclusive enclave that
lay across the Hindu Kush.

EMPIRE AND ETHNIC IDENTITY

IN THE CAUCASUS AND CENTRAL ASIA

Starting in the 1820s, German Orientalists set out to scour the border-
lands of the Russian Empire for evidence of an Indo-Germanic
Urheimat. The Caucasus Mountains and beyond them central Asia be-
came the focus of intensive German fieldwork sponsored by the Rus-
sian Academy of Sciences, which had a strategic interest in mapping the
linguistic and ethnographic landscape of the Empire's borderlands.
German Orientalists flocked to the Russian Empire, enticed by the pos-
sibility of a salary and by the prospect of tracing the westward path
taken by Indo-Germans. Scholars such as Christian Martin Frahn,
Bernhard Dorn, Issac Jacob Schmidt, and Julius Klaproth struggled to
sort out the linguistic affiliations of the Caucasian tribes and the no-
madic peoples of the central Asian steppes, debating which aspects of
their speech were Turkish and which Indo-European. 9S In the process,
the Indo-Germanic language family was defined in reference to linguis-
tic groups on its eastern borders. Scholars also began to see a correla-
tion between language and the likely physical characteristics of ethnic
groups.
Traveling to Russia was a wise career choice given the obstacles
hindering the pursuit of Oriental studies in the German states in the
early nineteenth century. Colonial powers such as England and France
were far better equipped to stock their national libraries with
manuscript collections and rare reference works. In 1837 the Arabist
and scholar of Hebrew Heinrich Ewald regretted that Germany still
suffered from a "dismal lack of material and resources.,,96 Aspiring Ger-

88
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

man scholars regularly made pilgrimages to colonial metropoles where

the royal library in Paris or London's East India Company offered
more vibrant intellectual communities. Although increasing in the
1820s, the number of university posts available to Orientalists was also
limited. In 1826 alone important university positions went to Friedrich
Rtickert in Erlangen, the Indologist Peter von Bohlen in Konigsberg,
and to Othmar Frank at the newly founded Ludwig-Maximillian Uni-
\'ersity in Munich. This raised the number of salaried scholars in Orien-
tal languages and literature to a half dozen. At a time when prominent
Germanists, such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, still served as librari-
ans, the institutionalization of Oriental studies was notable, but hardly
sufficient for an internationally recognized group of scholars.
The imperial ambitions of the Russian czars created a demand for
language specialists which Germans readily filled. In the early nine-
teenth century, Russia was progressively pushing its southernmost bor-
der through the Caucasus, annexing territory from Persia and the Ot-
toman Empire, and exploring the steppes of Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan. German linguists, such as Julius Klaproth, were invalu-
able aids in this process. Klaproth had taught himself Chinese while at-
tending the Joachimsthal Gymnasium in Berlin. His knowledge of the
language so attracted the Russian diplomat Jan Potocki that he ap-
pointed Klaproth professor of Asian languages and literature in Saint
Petersburg in 1804. From 1805 to 1807 Klaproth accompanied a Rus-
sian diplomatic mission through Mongolia to the Chinese border,
where he studied local languages and collected manuscripts that were
eventually sold to the Berlin Academy. The return trip took Klaproth
through Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and the Lake Baikal region. One year
later he was dispatched on the ill-fated mission to the Caucasus moun-
tains."? Klaproth subsequently helped author an influential plea by the
future Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov for the establishment of an
Asian Academy in Russia, developing for the purpose a detailed series
of courses on Oriental languages and literature. 98 For his services the
German scholar was made a member of the Russian Academy of Sci-
ences and was knighted into the order of Vladimir.""
The development of Oriental studies in the reign of Czar Alexan-
der 1 (1801-25) was part ofa larger project of the Europeanization of
Russia and generally relied on foreign scholars.loo The recognized
t()under of the modern discipline in Russia was the Arabist Christian
Martin Frahn (1782-1851), a German scholar enticed to enter Russian

89
 CHAPTER 2

service by the cultural spoils of its wars. Frahn had studied theology and
Oriental languages in Rostock, where he habilitated in 1806 under O.
G. Tychsen with an interpretation of the prophet Nahum. Here he also
held lectures on Arabic grammar and numismatics. In 1807 Frahn ac-
cepted one of the first Russian professorships of Oriental literature in
Kasan with title of privy councilor. The Arabist applied his talents to
writing early histories of Russia and the eastern Arabic empire. After
Tychsen's death in 1817, Frahn was offered the open post in Rostock,
which he intended to accept. But en route to Germany he stopped in
Saint Petersburg to catalogue coins in possession of the Russian
Academy of Science and remained indefinitely. The Russian emperor
named Frahn a member of the academy and its head librarian; Frahn
also became the director of the affiliated Asian Museum and an hon-
orary librarian of the royal collection. For German scholars interested
in the linguistic history of Asia, Russian colonial activity produced a
wealth of source material. In the words of C. M. Frahn, "Their last
campaigns against the Persians and Turks were once again honored by
a series of conquests in the realm of science; their generals not only
brought back guns and enemy flags as trophies of their brilliant victo-
ries, but also entire libraries of manuscripts; and as before our religious
mission in Peking and our traveling scholars have using peaceful means
acquired immense quantities of precious Chinese and Mongolian liter-
ary works."lol The German states could offer no such advantages to
their fledgling Orientalists. 102
Frahn brought other German Orientalists to Russia, including
Bernhard Dorn (1805-81), who had a specific interest in Indo- Euro-
pean tongues. After receiving degrees in theology and philology in Sax-
ony, the native Bavarian spent several years perusing Iranian
manuscripts in London. In 1827 his research led him to conclude that
German and Farsi were like two rivers in which "One blood flows";
they either "pour forth from a common source, that is, were originally
one, or they mutually arise and receive their life from rivers that stem
from this original source. "Im These similarities convinced Dorn, as they
did Klaproth, that the Caucasus "held in the midst of their arms a peo-
ple in whom perhaps the same blood flows as in US.,,104 Dorn accepted
a position as professor of Oriental languages at the University of
Kharkov in 1829, building a career in Russia that was dedicated to
studying Farsi, the Pashto dialect of Mghanistan, and Caucasian
tongues. I05 In 1835 he joined the Institute for Oriental Languages es-

90
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

tablished by the Russian foreign ministry in Saint Petersburg, and he

later replaced Frahn as the director of both the Asian Museum and the
academy library. His major works included multivolume histories of the
peoples bordering the Caspian Sea and those inhabiting the Caucasus,
regions he visited in the early 1860s.
Fieldwork in the Caucasus mountains led Orientalists such as
Dorn and Klaproth to link the linguistic forms of the Indo-European
family to certain characteristic physical attributes. Klaproth's reflections
on Ossetian, a member of the northeastern Iranian branch ofIndo-Eu-
ropean languages spoken in the northern Caucasus, are a case in point.
Despite his conviction that the Caucasus had been the original home-
land of Medo-Germans, the majority of local languages were unique
and indigenous; only Ossetian, Armenian, and three Turkish tongues
have ties to larger language families. Thus, when Klaproth braved war
and the plague to visit isolated speakers of the Ossetian language, he
was enticed by the prospect that they were the remains of an ancient
Medo-German colony. In Asia Polyglotta, Klaproth cited patterns in
"the formation of the cranium ,,106 as evidence that apparent lexical con-
vergences were not indications of shared ethnic ties; linguistic affinities
could only be confirmed, in his mind, through "physical uniformity.,,107
The Ossetes, he reported, distinguished themselves "in language and fa-
cial structure from all others in the Caucasus."IOH The tribe was a "well-
built people" whose "physiognomy" resembled "that of Europeans"; 109
the members had "blue eyes and blond or red-brown hair ... truly back
hair almost never.,,110 This suggested to Klaproth that Ossetian was the
lost fifth branch of the Indo-Germanic language family.
Other German Orientalists identified tribes in the eastern reaches
of ccntral Asia. The debate Klaproth and his rival Isaac Jacob Schmidt
(1779-1847) held over the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Uighurs,
inhabitants of Chinese Turkistan, for example, was part of an attempt
to discover how far the Indo- European language family extended into
Tibet, Mongolia, and western China. It was clear that Indo-Germans
had migrated to the furthest reaches of western Europe, but what was
their relationship to the ancient inhabitants of the Eurasian plateaus?
Schmidt was the leading early nineteenth-century scholar on the Mon-
golian and Tibetan languages, publishing in the course of the 1830s
grammars of both, a Mongolian dictionary, and an extended work on
the religion and literature of the two peoples. His interest in the region
Was varied, emanating, on the one hand, from a practical desire to fur-

91
 CHAPTER 2

ther Russian trade and industry by documenting the customs and tra-
ditions of their neighbors. III Schmidt was also intrigued by the origins
of the tribal migrations that had reshaped the ethnic landscape of Eu-
rope in the early medieval period. "Such national movements that were
aroused in inner Asia without a doubt extended their influence deep
into Europe long before our time period and probably populated our
part of the earth," he explained in 1824, "but we know neither the an-
cient history of the same nor of the largest part of Asia; really we know
the history of the tribal migrations of the fourth century alone in their
effects, not in their cause.,,112
Born the son of a salesman in Amsterdam, I. J. Schmidt received
his only formal education from the Moravian Brethren in Neuwied be-
tween 1785 and 1791. When his father was compelled for financial rea-
sons to take a post as a civil servant in Java in 1798, the nineteen-year-
old Schmidt was sent to Sarepta on the Volga River to fill a post in the
trade business of the Brethren. In neighboring regions Schmidt learned
Kalmyk, a Mongolian language spoken by Buddhists in the region of
Dzungaria. From 1804 to 1806 he resided with various nomadic tribes,
learning their languages and customs, and traveled across the steppes
stretching between the Volga, the Don, and the Caucasus mountains.
Schmidt remained in Russia working in the trade offices of the Mora-
vian Brethren in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As the head of the Rus-
sian Bible Society he translated the New Testament and other religious
works into Kalmyk and Mongolian; in 1843 he published the first Ti-
betan book in Europe, The Wise Man and the Fool, in the original lan-
guage and in German translation. The University of Rostock bestowed
a doctorate on him in 1827 and Schmidt was eventually accepted into
the Saint Petersburg Academy of Science before he went blind in 1842.
Schmidt's research was concerned with establishing the nature of
the cultural connections between ancient India, China, and the moun-
tainous regions that lay between them. Like Wilhelm von Humboldt,
who researched the languages of southeast Asia, Schmidt was intrigued
by the spread of Sanskrit forms. He likely came to Mongolian and Ti-
betan in an effort to learn more about the religious teachings of ancient
India. According to Schmidt, "the central Asian people, the true
guardians" had preserved aspects of otherwise extinct "ancient reli-
gious teachings" that had once been widespread in "Hindustan.',113
Schmidt and the few German Sinologists of the period believed that

92
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

India had exerted extensive influence on the development of Chinese

culture through a shared history in the Himalayan Mountains. He re-
garded the Chinese people as "originally perhaps nothing more ... ,
~han a bastard nation arising from a mix of Indian and high-Asian
blood." The inhabitants of India and their Bildung, he asserted, were
"far older" than those of China, who "certainly had no other nation in
the same degree as the Indians to thank" for their early development. I 14
The belief that the inhabitants of central Asia had ties to Sanskrit-
speaking India led to the classification of certain languages as "Indo-
Chinese." While they testified to the degree that Indian cultural influ-
ence extended eastward, these languages also marked the limits of
Indo-Germanic expansion in Asia. Under the rubric of Indo-Chinese
were included languages such as Burmese, Thai, and Vietnamese that,
according to the Sinal agist Wilhelm Schott (1807-89), both demon-
strated a "spiritual kinship with Chinese" and were "permeated with
words from the Sanskrit family." While none of these was considered to
be a "connecting link between Chinese and Indian," language families
contemporary linguists now distinguish from each other, their coexis-
tence "from time immemorial in a land that stretches from anterior
India to south China" seemed to point to substantial cultural ties be-
tween speakers of Chinese and early Indo- European languages. lls
Despite these attractions, German research on Chinese languages
was scant in the first half of the nineteenth century and reflects a reluc-
tance to identify early German speakers with east Asian civilization.
When Wilhelm Schott disparaged in the mid -1820s that "in this area
very little has been achieved in our fatherland" and "in part the most
adventurous and perverted views of the Chinese ... still circulate," 116 he
was not mistaken. Schott and Carl Friedrich Neumann (1807-89), a Si-
nologist at the University of Munich, were two of only three German
philologists who specialized in the language. Schott hoped that Chinese
might one day be held "approximately in the same regard" as Sanskrit
was for the study of Indian languages and Arabic was for Islamic history,
given its importance in the Far East and its ties to Annamese, Korean,
and Japanese. 117 However, his immersion in the Chinese language was
not equal to the demands of fellow philologists. Schott's sources for
learning Chinese were, according to Klaproth, inadequate-a three-year
acquaintance with two native speakers in Europe whom Klaproth de-
rided as "two common fellows from villages in the administrative dis-

93
 CHAPTER 2

trict of Canton ... ,one of whom worked as a cook, both of whom had
forced themselves on a prospector in order to show themselves for
money like wild animals in Europe.,,118
The negative associations with the study of Chinese in Germany
suggest that the German national identification with the East, while it
extended to the central Asian peoples who had supposedly sparked the
tribal migrations, broke down at the Chinese border. Not being an in-
flectional language, Chinese was not so amenable to the techniques of
comparative-historical philology as Indo-European tongues and was
quickly stigmatized as a primitive, underdeveloped language. Friedrich
Schlegel believed Chinese to be of the lowest rank in the hierarchy of
affixionallanguages;119 Jacob Grimm thought primordial speech would
have resembled Chinese-more advanced tongues developed inflec-
tions and richer syntax;120 Wilhelm von Humboldt counted Chinese
among the "less perfected languages," the one most distinct from San-
skrit.12l C. F. Neumann feared that Chinese speakers had never reached
a crucial third stage in evolution of writing; they "never ... broke
down or dissolved the word into its simplest elements; they never pro-
gressed to the most perfect medium of representation, to the letter al-
t ,,122
p h a b e.
Nevertheless, when C. M. Frahn invited the Sinologist Wilhelm
Schott to accept a position at the university of Saint Petersburg in
1840, he opted to remain in Berlin. Schott's decision reflects both the
development of Oriental studies in Germany and the limits of Russia's
scholarly attractions. In the early 1820s, Schott had hoped to train in
Paris under the Sinologist Jean Pierre Abel Remusat (1788-1832). Fi-
nancial considerations compelled him to restrict his travels to Berlin,
where he was hired to catalogue Chinese books at the royal library. In
1838 Schott was made professor of Chinese, Tartar, and east Asian lan-
guages and no longer felt a compunction to venture abroad. By mid-
century newly acquired reference materials and library collections had
made language acquisition less laborious for German Orientalists; pub-
lishers in Bonn, Berlin, and Munich had come into possession of the
Sanskrit type necessary to print aHordable editions of Indian works. 123
(German scholars active in central Asia found it "absolutely necessary"
to publish in Germany due, in Klaproth's words, to the "difficulty of
circulating a book published in Russia in the rest of the world."t 4 The
technical acumen of the comparative-historical techniques inaugurated

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 URHEIMAT ASIEN

bv Bopp and Jacob Grimm had likewise made Germany a recognized

c~nter for philological study in Europe. 125

BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND THE

HISTORICIZATION OF HEBREW

I f German Orientalists reached consensus on Chinese marking the east-

ern border of the Indo-Germanic language family, languages that A. L.
Schl6zer had termed "Semitic" in 1804 presented the discipline with
more of a dilemma. 126 The theological faculties of German universities
had long revered Hebrew as a sacred language that supposedly gave
privileged access to ontological truth and was the most likely immedi-
ate descendent of the divine Ursprache spoken before Babel. In the
1820s and I830s the study of Hebrew began to emerge from within
theological faculties and became subject to the critical standards of
comparative-historical philology. But the theological training of the
leading Semitic philologists made the radical historicization of the lan-
guage within its immediate family slow and contentious. At stake, on
the one hand, was the unsettling application of comparative philology
within liberal Protestant biblical criticism. More precise knowledge of
Hebrew and related tongues enabled scholars of the Old Testament to
challenge traditional ideas about authorship, for example, or the history
of the Israelite religion. 12 ? Language scholars contributed to a long as-
sault on the Protestant dream of an orthodox church founded on bib-
lical authority, frequently disrupting more traditional readings of scrip-
ture.
On the other hand, the historicization of Semitic languages raised
larger questions regarding the perceived cultural affinities and histori-
cal relations between Christian and Jewish Germans. Protestant schol-
ars of Hebrew, including Wilhelm Gesenius (1786-1842), Heinrich
Ewald, Julius Furst, and Franz Wullner, tried to prove that the Indo-
European and Semitic language families were more closely related than
at first believed. They developed a theory of the languages' "root word
aHi.nity" ( WurzelverwandtschaJt) that rested on the assumption that the
earliest ancestors of these language families had once lived in close
proximity to another and that the verb roots typical of both languages
were similar. Their efforts were part of an attempt to show that com-
parative linguistics could support biblical history and that the origins of
humanity were monogenetic. 12R Such an approach stood in conflict with

95
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some comparative-historical philologists, still a minority, who insisted

on a greater distinction between Indo-European and Semitic tongues
and on a polygene tic view of human beginnings.
Wilhelm Gesenius, the first scholar to approach the Semitic lan-
guage family with new comparative and historical methods, did so in
his capacity as theologian. Born in Nordhausen, Thuringia, in 1786,
Gesenius studied philosophy and theology at the University of Helm-
stedt, later transferring to Gottingen where he worked under J. G.
Eichhorn and T. C. Tychsen. By the age of twenty-five, he had ob-
tained a chair at the University of Halle. Gesenius insisted that that "a
secure basis" for the historical-critical exegesis of the Old Testament
could only be established "through precise and certain knowledge of
language." 129 He argued that his fellow theologians were mistaken
when "the majority" regarded Hebrew as the closest descendent of the
"originary, universal" tongue and tried to prove this with linguistic ev-
idence. 1olo Gesenius's Hebrew-German Dictionary (1812) and his influ-
ential Hebrew Grammar ( 1813) leveled all distinctions in the treatment
of biblical tongues, situating Hebrew historically in relation to other
Semitic languages such as Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Samaritan Hebrew,
and Maltese.
The implications that historicizing Hebrew had for biblical criti-
cism Gesenius articulated in his History of the Hebrew Language and
Script (1815). The text broadly distinguished two periods in the history
of Hebrew, with the Babylonian exile marking a point of transition. 131
More significantly, Gesenius argued that the language of the Penta-
teuch did not date to the time of Moses. It coincided, rather, with
other historical books, generally believed to have been written one
thousand years later. In his view, either Moses did not compose the
Pentateuch, or Hebrew's lack of change over time was an event "un-
equalled in the history of language, namely that the living language of
a people and their circle of ideas had remained unchanged. ,,132 He sug-
gested that the Mosaic texts tried to imitate an older style, but that the
various compilers were not able to withstand "the pressure of a living
language. ,,133 Priests, for example, had compiled the books of Chroni-
cles using material from the earlier books of Samuel and Kings. Even
documents contained in the Pentateuch that might have been very an-
cient were probably rewritten in a later language. Gesenius based this
interpretation not on contextual clues, but on "language in the narrow
sense, that is, the linguistic inventory, its particular forms and appear-

96
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

ances."IH The compilers had anachronistically substituted later words

t()r earlier ones, while adding grammatical glosses, explanations, and
.
suppose d Improvements.
13S

The scandals associated with another liberal theologian, Wilhelm

Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780-1849), indicate just how con-
tentious these claims were. In his Critical and Historical Introduction
to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament (1806-7), de Wette ap-
plied a concept of myth derived from early Romanticism to claim that
the five books of Moses were useless as a chronology of events. In his
view, they should be regarded instead as a Hebrew national epic that
mirrored the spirit and mentality of Hebrew theocracy.136 According to
the Old Testament, Moses gave the Israelites a fully fledged legal sys-
tem, sacrificial cult, and priesthood. De Wette countered that the laws
and sacrifices attributed to Moses actually dated to the reigns of David
and Solomon. The Pentateuch had been written hundreds of years after
the fact in order to legitimate religious practices that emerged only after
the Babylonian exile. 137 Politically, as George Williamson has shown, de
Wette equated Protestantism with obedience to conscience and the de-
tense of individual and national autonomy. This required distancing
Protestantism from the myths of Judaism and Roman Catholicism. It
also brought de Wette into conflict with Prussian authorities. After the
murder of August von Kotzebue in 1819, de Wette was branded a rad-
ical democrat and demagogue, was suspended from his teaching posi-
tion in Berlin, and was eventually replaced by the conservative theolo-
gian Ernst von Hengstenberg (1802-69).138
Gesenius himself fell victim for supporting de Wette's position on
philological grounds. In 1830 an anonymous article published in
Hengstenberg's Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, a strictly orthodox jour-
nal, charged Gesenius with "rationalism" and undermining the teach-
ings of the church, as well as with inciting his students to laughter dur-
ing lectures. According to his opponent, Gesenius's approach to the
Old Testament undercut its "authority as a font of divine revelation. ,,139
The accusations gave rise to the famed "Hallischer Streit," in which
Gesenius's students protested in his support. The Prussian minister
Karl von Altenstein convened a commission to investigate the charges,
which King Friedrich Wilhelm eventually dropped after a reprimand
that Gesenius remain solemn in class. 140 It is likely that Gesenius was
not a convinced rationalist of the theological kind, but rather that his

97
 CHAPTER 2

historical sense merely evoked mistrust of anything miraculous and su-

pernatural.'4'
Not all students of Semitic languages followed the example of
Gesenius. His great rival, Heinrich Ewald, opposed the path de Wette
charted, although not for reasons of orthodoxy. Born the son of a linen
weaver in Gottingen in 1803, Ewald combined liberal politics and lan-
guage scholarship. For most of his career he held a position in Orien-
tal philology and Old Testament exegesis in the town of his birth,
where he helped reform the Hanoverian church. When he joined the
"Gottingen Seven" in protest of King Ernst August's revocation of
Hannover's liberal constitution in 1837, Ewald was forced to enter
eleven years of exile in Tubingen until the constitution was restored.
When Gottingen became Prussian in the wake of the war with Austria,
he refused to take a new oath of loyalty to King Wilhelm 1 and was
forced into retirement in 1867. Ewald applied Bopp's method of lin-
guistic criticism to the language structures and historical evolution of
Semitic tongues. He opposed what he perceived as the superficiality of
the empirical knowledge upon which comparative grammar rested in
the 1830s and 1840s, however, and sought to elevate it to more than
·
a tec h l11que. '42

Ewald's eight-volume History of Israel (1843-52) was more posi-

tive about the Mosaic texts than Gesenius, finding pieces of authentic
history in the narratives of the patriarchs. Ewald applied to the Old Tes-
tament the same method used by B. G. Niehbuhr and K. O. Muller,
who uncovered a solid basis for history in classical legends and myths.'H
The introduction to the first volume presented a complex theory of lit-
erary composition. In Ewald's view large amounts of material in the Old
Testament had been rewritten before assuming their extant form, but
precise historical dating could identifY truly archaic passages. Ewald first
established that the Hebrews possessed the art of writing at the time of
Moses. "Investigation into the Semitic languages," he argued, proved
that an early version of Hebrew characters was "first employed by an
unknown primitive Semitic people." From them, all the "Asiatic mem-
bers" of the "Semitic nations" received writing, along with a common
name for God.'44 Ewald then ordered his sources into three chronolog-
ical groupings based on "rare and archaic peculiarities in the usage of
words,,:'45 the Great Book of Origins, including the Pentateuch and
Joshua; the Great Book of Kings; and the Great Book of universal his-
tory to Greek times. In his view the descriptions of Israel's religion in

98
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

the early monarchy were more than a fantasy of the post-exilic period. 146
For the duration of the nineteenth century, there was residual re-
sistance to philological attempts to historicize and contextualize the
Old Testament based on language. Ewald's most prominent student,
tor example, Julius Wellhausen, declared that his mentor long pre-
\'ellted the correct insight into the development of Israelite history
tj'om taking hold. 147 An analysis of how philology, as an interpretive
practice, shaped Protestant biblical criticism in the nineteenth century
is beyond the scope of this study; most exegetes were not linguists, and
their arguments revolve around the use, not the history, of language.
But language scholars provided the tools necessary for theologians to
date scripture and discuss authorship. The synoptic gospel debate,
sparked by Christian Hermann Weisse's The Gospel History Critically
and Philosophically Treated (1838) is a case in point. Theologians had
long had difficulty explaining textual similarities and differences among
the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The dating of language en-
abled Weisse to argue that the Gospel of Mark was an earlier source
upon which Matthew and Luke had built, along with a lost collection
of Jesus's sayings. For decades, Weisse stood isolated against the ac-
cepted Tiibingen school, which favored the Griesbach hypothesis; its
notion that Mark was a synthesis of Matthew and the later Luke was
1110re amenable to the prevailing Hegelian philosophy.148 Only with the
publication of Heinrich Julius Holtzmann's The Synoptic Gospels: Their
Ori,Hin and Historical Character (1863) did a revised version of the
(now largely accepted) two-source hypothesis prevail.
Debates over Mosaic history extended beyond issues of scriptural
authority to address the historical relationship between Christianity and
Judaism. Language scholarship contributed to reducing the signifi-
cance of Jews to the faith of Christ. Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918),
t()r example, advanced in 1876 his well-known Documentary Hypoth-
esis, His History of Israel divided passages from the Pentateuch into
three historical groupings, Their progression revealed the institutional-
ization of the Israelite religion and its supposed process of degenera-
tion. In the first stage, inferred from the Yahwistic history (1) and the
related Elohistic source (E), the religion of Israel was a natural faith,
t"ce from law and compulsion; documents in the Deuteronomic strand
(D) revealed that the festivals were increasingly detached from nature;
the dates of their celebration were mathematically determined, and the
priesthood was exclusively Levitical; the Priestly source (P) testified to

99
 CHAPTER 2

a religion with a centralized cult, fixed festivals, and a priesthood lim-

ited to the clan of Aaron. Wellhausen implied that "Judaism" was the
religion of Israel after it had died; the spiritual religion of Israel had de-
volved into the ghost he called" Judaism." For Wellhausen, the injunc-
tive elements of the Torah, the commandments, defined Judaism, but
the book merely represented "the ghost of a life which is closed." Sim-
ilarly, the Pharisees of Jesus's time were Jews in the extreme: narrow,
legalistic, exclusivistic, compulsive, and hypocritical. 14Y The assurance
that the Law was later than the rest of the Old Testament enabled Well-
hausen to argue that Christ's restoration of righteousness without the
Torah represented a return to the pure faith of Abraham's day.ISo
Language factored into biblical critics' attempts to understand the
contributions neighboring peoples made to the early history of Judaism
as well. Semitic tongues tend to vary more with place than with time.
Hebrew texts written before and after the Babylonian exile are thus not
as distinct as parts of the Old Testament composed in Babylonia, Pales-
tine, and the Southern and Northern Kingdoms. Theodor Benfey
lamented in 1869 that there still was no comparative grammar of
Semitic languages equivalent to those for the Indo- European family.
Yet the list of Hebrew scholars working on Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic,
Samaritan, and Ethiopian is considerable. 151
Starting in the 1840s, comparative philologists tackled Assyrian
with a view to the influence the language of ancient Babylonia had ex-
erted on Hebrew. In 1857 the German Orientalist Julius Oppert
(1825-1905) was one of four men to decipher the cuneiform script
found on the Michaux Stone brought from Mesopotamia to Paris in
1800. Oppert had joined a French archaeological expedition to Baby-
lon from 1851 to 1854 and was later appointed Professor of Assyriol-
ogy at the College de France. The Berlin Semitist and founder of Ger-
man Assyriology Eberhard Schrader (1836-1908) began applying the
language to the study of scripture in The Cuneiform Inscriptions and
the Old Testament (I R72), suggesting that elements of the Hebrew
Bible had been borrowed from the Babylonian religion. 152 In the same
year, the London Times carried the announcement that the Assyriologist
George Smith (1840-76) had discovered close parallels in cuneiform
tablets between the Gilgamesh epic and the biblical stories of Creation
and the Deluge. Friedrich Delitzsch later advocated revising the inter-
pretation of Hebrew favored by Wilhelm Gesenius in The Hebrew Lan-
guage Viewed in Light of Assyrian Research (1883). According to

100
 URHEIMAT ASlEN

Dditzsch, the Assyrian language, "which embodies a world of ancient

Semitic thought and speech, disclosed an entirely new foundation for
the understanding of the sacred language of the Old Testament. ,,153
Specifically, he believed that Hebrew etymology should no longer be
derived from the supposedly original meanings found in Arabic roots.
These were often too recent, and scholars should instead rely on the an-
cient language of Babylon.
Conservative Protestants rallied against the derivation of the Old
Testament from Assyrian precedents following the three notorious
Babel-und-die-Bibellectures that Delitzsch held at the German Orien-
tal Society from 1902 to 1905. Son of the theologian Franz Delitzsch,
Friedrich served as professor of Semitic Languages and Assyriology in
Leipzig and Breslau before joining the Friedrich Wilhelm University in
Berlin in 1899. He published dictionaries and grammars of Assyrian
and Sumerian, as well as his interpretation of Hebrew based on Assyr-
ian research. With Kaiser Wilhelm II present, Delitzsch proclaimed that
the Hebrews borrowed the stories of the Creation, the Fall, and the
Deluge from Babylonia, where they had originated in pure form. A
public outcry followed his presentations, and the Kaiser was forced to
distance himself from Delitzsch's notions.
Minimizing the importance of the ancient Hebrews within the
history of Christianity had clear anti-Semitic overtones. As Maurice
Olender has noted, this is typical of much comparative philological
scholarship. Detailed knowledge of grammar and etymology helped
dissolve biblical narrative within a broader history of the non biblical
East. Oriental studies, as Suzanne L. Marchand argues, disrupted the
biblical foundations of European identity, as well the nineteenth cen-
tury's idealization of classical Greece. 154 The historicization of sacred
languages was a key moment in the unsettling of theological ortho-
doxy. The study of Semitic languages and New Testament Greek there-
tore remained ensconced in the traditional environment of biblical
scholarship long after comparative philology earned independent status
as a discipline.

THE OTHER ORIENT: JEWS AND INDO-GERMANS

Research on Hebrew and its affiliates had more than religious urgency.
The presence of a linguistic minority in the German states that was as-
\Ociated with Hebrew and whose nationality was being questioned as
part of the reaction against the emancipation edicts of the Napoleonic

101
 CHAPTER 2

period raised questions about the likely proximity of the Indo-Euro-

pean and Semitic language families. The emancipation of German Jews
had not been made on the basis of natural rights; rather, arguments for
easing restrictions on occupation, residence, and excessive taxation had
relied on the notion that German Jews would be "regenerated" under
the supervision of a tutelary bureaucratic state. Jews were expected to
break out of their supposedly autonomous communities and become
fully integrated in society by, among other things, adopting the Ger-
man language. ISS During the first half of the nineteenth century, the ev-
eryday language of most of the Ashkenazi Jewish community living in
central Europe was still Yiddish. But the period from 1806 to 1819 was
one of language acculturation in which German increasingly became
the dominant language of the Jewish public sphere. At a time when
other German dialects were gaining new cultural prestige, Yiddish lost
its standing as a language in its own right and came to be despised as
bad or corrupt German. IS6
Despite, or perhaps, as a result of these efforts, there was an often
repeated perception in mainstream society that Jews were imitating,
not mastering, the German language. "Mauscheln"-speaking German
as Moses might have-was the derogatory term applied to the Jewish
dialect. The success oflanguage acculturation depended on factors such
as social mobility, urbanization, and gender so that poorer Jewish im-
migrants from eastern Europe or new arrivals in the towns tended to
retain their distinctive dialects; second- and third-generation speakers
of German preserved the vocabulary of insular subcultures, especially
words relating to trade and commerce, as well as their own distinctive
gestures, rhythms, and intonations. Even university educated Jews
speaking faultless High German, Jacob Toury has suggested, appeared
to have artificial language skills because they could not slip into a local
"German" dialect as their peers did in informal settings. ls7
Anti-Semitic works from the post-Napoleonic period cited the ar-
tificiality of Jewish German as evidence that Jews had not earned the
right to full participation in the national community and, in fact, were
not capable of ever fully acquiring the language that defined one's Ger-
manness. One critic claimed in 1816 that because "nationality and
youthful impressions can never be fully eradicated, these problems con-
front ... even the most educated Jews. And even if they are successful
in adopting certain linguistic forms ... to a point of deception, some
time or other a mistaken national tone [nationaler Mijllaut] will sur-

102
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

prise them . and then arouse a very odd sensation. "ISH In the late
eighteenth century, Yiddish had been perceived as a jargon of crooks
and robbers, a secret language binding together Jews engaged in com-
merce and business. 159 Mter emancipation, the continued use of He-
brew and Yiddish was thought to undermine bourgeois ideals of social
respectability. Jewish religious services and schools were branded sites
of "irreverence and undignified behavior" and were seen as such a
threat to the social order that the rulers of some German states ordered
prayers to be said in German and forbade noise, merriment, and the
moving about during religious services. Ion
Given the expressive theory of language favored by comparative-
historical philologists and the perceived centrality of German to mem-
bership in the nation, debates over the affinities between Indo-Euro-
pean and Semitic tongues became debates over the limits of Jewish
acculturation, emancipation, and cultural regeneration. If the two lan-
guage families evolved from a common ancestor, then speakers of Ger-
man and Yiddish could be shown to have common historical roots and
to share aspects of the same linguistic organism thought to shape a
people's intellect and nationality. If the perceived points of origin for
German and Yiddish speakers were irreconcilable, then preserving the
integrity of German national culture would mandate a much higher
degree of Jewish integration.
The theological background of many Orientalists encouraged sev-
eral prominent students of Hebrew to search for bridging mechanisms
that linked the Semitic and Indo-European language families in a
shared prehistoric union. Following Friedrich Schlegel, the majority of
strict comparative-historical philologists distinguished Hebrew by the
dissyllabic character of its verb roots. In their written form the roots of
Hebrew verbs are made up of three consonants, forming two syllables
rather than one as is the case in Sanskrit. Contemporary linguists no
longer consider the number of root syllables to be decisive in classifY-
ing languages, as the unity of the syllable itself has been cast into
doubt.I(,1 But theologically minded philologists attempted to derive
Hebrew roots from simpler forms so as to show their affinity with San-
skrit and thereby light the way to a common, primordial homeland.
Heinrich Ewald's Hebrew Grammar (1828), for example, argued
that Hebrew roots consisting of three consonants were actually based
on a shorter root form composed of a radical that either doubled itself
or added a soft consonant on the end. Because he believed these

103
 CHAPTER 2

shorter radicals to be closer to the "shortest original roots" (Ur-

wurze!n), Ewald concluded that Hebrew occupied a level oflanguage
development that was midway between Chinese, "which had remained
truest to primordial times," and the "Indo-Germanic language family
which had matured to manhood," a supposition that assumed the orig-
inal unity of language types. Similarly, Gesenius remarked in the 1830
edition of his Hebrew Grammar that Semitic and Indo-European lan-
guages showed an affinity in large numbers of their root words. He
concluded based on this evidence that the two families must have de-
veloped their roots together before branching off; Indo- European pat-
terns of inflection had arisen later and were therefore unique to that
f:aml·1y. 1~2
These efforts to reconcile the grammatical structures of Semitic
and Indo-European were part of a campaign to preserve the original
unity oflanguage and humanity despite the secularizing effects of com-
parative philology. Well into the nineteenth century theologically in-
spired Hebraists tried geographically to locate the likely Garden of
Eden where the common ancestor of both families had resided. Julius
Furst (1805-73), a student of Gesenius who had broken off his rab-
binical training in order to pursue a career in Semitic philology, argued
in 1835 that the Semitic and Sanskrit language families had once been
united in an "original northern residence" somewhere in southwest
Asia. His Collection of Aramaic Idioms with Reference to the Indo-Ger-
manic Languages (1835) intended "to bring Semitic closer to the fa-
milial band of Indo-European languages" by presenting evidence of a
"formal original unity" oflanguage. 163 In 1862 Heinrich Ewald likewise
argued that there was a "higher connection" among the most diverse
of language families. Turkish, Indo-Germanic, Semitic, and Coptic
showed evidence of "a primordial identity" that, in his view, could only
be explained by "their separation from a common last source." Accord-
ing to Ewald, language had developed fully among an "original peo-
ple" (Urvolke) before splitting into separate families, and "humanity'S
first tribe" had been at home in "northern Asia. ,,104
The Indologist Theodor Benfey (1809-81) likewise stressed the
ties linking Semitic and Indo-Germanic antiquity, but without the
compulsion of theology. Born the son of a small-town Jewish merchant
in the state of Hannover, Benfey was a precocious student oflanguages.
As a four-year-old boy he learned Hebrew from his father; older broth-
ers taught him to conjugate and decline Latin long before he could

104
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

rcad the alphabet. When his father requested that Benfey defer study-
ing medicine due to the young age at which he entered the University
of Gbttingen, he chose classical philology instead. Benfey acquired for-
mal training in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin from K. O. Muller and G. L.
Dissen, spending a semester with Heinrich Ewald and Friedrich Thier-
sell in Munich. He shared their commitment to liberal nationalism, at-
tending the Hambach Festival in 1832 and later welcoming Prussia's
efforts to unity Germany. These political sympathies, however, do not
explain why Bcnfey struggled to find a salaried university position. He
labored as an unpaid lecturer in Gbttingen for nine years, postponing
his marriage to Fanny Wallerstein, and then only obtaining a meager
salary in 1843 after winning the prestigious Volney prize for a lexicon
of Greek roots. Despite a splendid career he was repeatedly denied pro-
motion and lodged British students to supplement his income. Accord-
ing to Benfey's daughter Meta, the impossibility of a Jew pursuing a ca-
reer in comparative Indo- European philology forced him to convert in
1848. 165
An accidental wager encouraged Theodor Benfey to learn Sanskrit
in 1830. Friends bet that four weeks were too few for him to review a
book in an unknown language. Benfey proved them wrong and increas-
ingly dedicated his energies to Indology.l66 Like A. W. Schlegel he ap-
proached the field from a foundation in classical philology, applying his
critical and textual skills to editing the Vedas and placing Vedic Sanskrit
in historical and comparative perspective. The publication of a 356-page
article on India in Ersch and Gruber's 1840 encyclopedia first earned
him success in the field. Critical editions and translations of the Sama
Veda (1848), ancient Vedic religious chants, and the Panchatantra
( 1859), a collection of Indian animal fables, as well as Benfey's Sanskrit
grammars and dictionaries solidified his reputation. Benfey likewise
edited inscriptions in Old Persian, rightly arguing for a close connection
between Vedic Sanskrit and Old Avestan, the language of the sacred
Zoroastrian hymns or Gathas. 167
Hebrew and other Semitic languages also received Benfey's atten-
tions, so that contemporaries held him in awe for his mastery of both
Indian and Hebrew antiquity.168 His two main works in the field both
t()rcgrounded moments of cultural contact between speakers of Indo-
European and Semitic languages. His treatise On the Month Names of
Some Ancient Peoples (1836), for example, argued that Hebrew names
t()r the months had been adopted from Farsi during the Babylonian

105
Theodor Benfey, scholar of Indo-European and Semitic antiquity.
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

exile; the later expansion of the Persian Empire into Syria and Palestine
reinforced the borrowed terms. '69 Similarly, the introduction to Ben-
fey's Pantschatantra stressed the importance of Arabic and Jewish
translators in the transmission of Indian fairy tales and animal fables to
Europe.'70 More significantly, Benfey proposed in On the Egyptian)s Re-
lationship to the Semitic Language Family (1844) that Semitic tongues
were related to Coptic, the variant of ancient Egyptian spoken circa
200-1100 and the liturgical language of Coptic Christianity. He suc-
cessfully linked Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (Ethiopian) languages,
helping to classiJY what is today known as the Mro-Asiatic language
family. Baron Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen had earlier proposed that
Coptic arose in a union of Semitic and Indo-European languages.'7'
And Benfey acknowledged a possible affinity in the root words of both
families, while partaking in Bopp's skepticism of their sharing inflective
t()fms. 172
Benfey's main contribution to linguistics challenged, albeit unsuc-
cessfully, Bopp's understanding of the original monosyllabic elements
that had composed Proto-Indo-European. His theory of "primary
verbs" made more likely the prospect of finding evidence that Semitic
and Indo-European forms had descended from the same source. Bopp
assumed the existence of two primordial classes of Indo- European
roots. Verbal roots had evolved into verbs and nouns; pronominal roots
gave form to pronouns, conjunctions, particles, and prepositions.,n By
1837 Benfey had rejected the term "root" on the grounds that the
most primitive elements of Indo-European languages had not been
roots, but a primordial type of monosyllabic verb.'74 These primary
verbs had produced nouns and all other grammatical forms. m A new
theory of suffixes supported this hypothesis. Within the Indo- Euro-
pean family, Bopp assumed that noun torms originated from the affix-
ing of a case-sign to a root. Most such nouns had an element between
the root and the case-sign, known as stem-forming suffixes. Bopp be-
lieved that all stem-forming suffixes derived from a collection of pro-
nouns. In Bentey's view, these suffixes were originally the same and de-
rived from the verbal form ant, which appears in the present active
participle of Sanskrit. '76
According to Benfey, the search for primary monosyllabic verbs
took the linguist back to an earlier moment in the evolution of Indo-
European languages before roots had formed. Primary verbs "preceded
[roots] by many stages oflinguistic development. ,,177 He accepted, fur-

107
 CHAPTER 2

thcrmore, the "possibility of a common origin for aU languages. " "Lan-

guages for which no connection can be proven," Benfey argued, could
"have sprouted from a common stock and have distanced themselves
more than others from it." Unfortunately, he feared, the evidence taken
from various languages in support of this thesis was still "incapable" of
withstanding "a critical gaze." Knowledge of how roots emerged
within the Semitic languages was "still in the deepest obscurity," and
linguists only stood "at the beginning" for other tongues. 178 Neverthe-
less, discovering monosyllabic primary verbs made it more conceivable
that the different root types found in Indo- European and in Semitic
languages could have emerged from a common source or Urform.
A number of comparativists differentiated strictly between Indo-
European and Semitic languages and rejected the principles upon
which their supposed affinity was based. Taking Franz Wullner to task,
Friedrich August Pott, for example, launched a diatribe against the type
of "lumping languages together" (Sprachmengerei) that was based ex-
clusively on lexical comparisons of words, roots, and syllables. Gese-
nius, Ewald, and Furst had supported their arguments for the original
unity of humanity and language with the theory that grammatical com-
parisons were not necessary as a criterion of relationship if similarities
in root words could be proven. 179 Pott dismissed such "heroes of
pseudo-etymologies," calling their work a "shameful horror" and the
"death of true science."lso Similarly, the Bonn Indologist August Wil-
helm Schlegel insisted that the Semitic languages were "distinct" from
the Indo-Germanic family: "no etymological tour de force can bring
them back to a cummon origin. ,,181 Schlegel, like Pott, believed in "plu-
ralistic human beginnings" and in an "original diversity ... of foreign
language families." 182
Theories of the radical otherness and inferiority of Hebrew, the
language thought to be what defined the Semitic family, initially built
off of Friedrich Schlegel's mistaken belief that it was not an inflectional
language like Sanskrit. According to Kunrad Koerner, the triconsonan-
tal base of Hebrew and Arabic would actually have qualified them as in-
flectionallanguages.IS:l In 1808, however, this grammatical particularity
was not recognized. Schlegel, who maintained functionally polygeneti-
cist views and saw no correspondence between basic linguistic types,
classified Hebrew as a language in which "declensions are formed by
supplementary particles, instead of inflections of the rout" rather than
as an organic language related to Sanskrit. 184 He denied that dissyllabic

108
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

languages were truly philosophical; as the ancient Hebrews had lived

under "Oriental" climatic conditions, he believed their literature to be
the product of the uncontrolled imagination that prevailed in hot cli-
mates and therefore to be lacking in refinement. IH5
Hebrew's perceived distance from Sanskrit assumed larger cul-
tural significance in early nineteenth-century Germany given the em-
phasis placed on language and origins in German ideas of nationhood.
Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay On the Diversity of Human Language
Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the
Human Species (1830-35), for example, argued that language was a
creative power or enet;geia that governed the cognition and worldview
of its speakers. Words were responsible for "shaping the mental power
of the nation," so that one could discern the degree and type of a given
people's "intellectuality" based on the linguistic principles of their na-
tive tongue. In Humboldt's view the peculiarities of the Semitic lan-
guages did not just point to an alternative cultural starting point from
the Indo- European family; they reflected the different mental energies
of the "nations" that spoke them. Hebrew, in his analysis, belonged to
those languages that possessed an "imperfect organism" and deviated
from "the natural build" of the Indo-European family. The triconso-
nantal base of Hebrew verbs resulted, Humboldt explained, in "a con-
strained word formation to which the freedom of other languages, es-
pecially of the Sanskrit family, is justly preferable. ,,186 He acknowledged
that Hebrew made use of inflections, but believed them to be of an in-
ferior kind; in his interpretation, declensions and pronouns in Hebrew
were expressed through additional particles. m For these reasons, Hum-
boldt concluded, one had "to count the Semitic languages among
those that deviate from the most acceptable path of mental develop-
ment. ,,188
This view did not necessarily translate into political anti-Semitism.
Humboldt was an important advocate of the 1812 Prussian act of
emancipation and favored granting equal legal status to Jews on the
basis of natural rights alone. 189 Yet he expected a process of emancipa-
tion and reeducation (Bitdung) to create a culturally and linguistically
homogeneous community in which the Jewish subculture was com-
pletely dissolved. 190 The Romantic ideology of the Christian state and
the continued Christian character of the German university system dur-
ing the Restoration reinforced the notion that Jews must acquire the
cultural, religious, and political traditions of mainstream German soci-

109
 CHAPTER 2

ety before becoming members of the nation.I'!1 Even when German na-
tionalism did not directly include devotion to the Christian faith, na-
tionalist goals were often identifIed with the content and significance of
Christianity. In Fears that the Jewish minority formed a "state within a
state" refusing to submit to bureaucratic authority evolved into a neg-
ative depiction of Jews as a distinct Volk, especially as the mechanical
view of the state typical of the eighteenth century gave way to an or-
ganic conception of nationhood.
Comparative philologists aided in this process of cultural segrega-
tion by "Orientalizing" the ancient Hebrews and excluding Jews from
the sacred drama of salvation being carried out by a chosen Indo- Eu-
ropean people. The Orientalization of European Jews has a history
prior to the nineteenth century. Enlightenment Pietists, for example,
wishing to purge ceremonial and ritual "Jewish" elements from their
religion of pure ethics, had already tried to detach Christianity from its
"Oriental" origins. 193 Insisting on the disparate origins of the Semitic
and Indo- European language families once again threatened to rob the
ancient Hebrews of religious significance. As Maurice Olender has ob-
served, nineteenth-century philologists were willing to accept that the
ancient Semites held the secret of monotheism but denied them any
role in universal historical progress. Science, art, and the mastery over
nature were portrayed as achievements of Aryan antiquity; the Semites
were depicted as being immobile and in need of the dynastic and mi-
gratory abilities of the Indo-Europeans to spread the word of God. 194
In his view, Hebrews were identified with an invariable truth that ex-
cluded them from historical change and as such were in need of being
rescued from the timeless paradise to which they had been relegated. 19 '
Comparative philologists such as Johann Heinrich Kalthoff
(1803-39) devalued the contributions ancient Hebrews had made to
religion and cultural progress. l % A student of A. W. Schlegel, he com-
bined comparative philology and archaeology in his Handbook of He-
braic Antiquities (1840). According to Kalthoff~ "ancient Jewish life
... found in religion its entire definition." However, he understood the
religiosity of the Hebrews within the larger context of a mystical, reli-
gious Orient. 197 The only thing unique about the Hebrews was that un-
like the Chinese, for example, they were able to differentiate God and
nature and recognized the true creator and Lord. The "outward cul-
tural state" of the Hebrews revealed to Kalthoff their failure to
progress. Despite an intense inner life and "all their true high Bildung,"

llO
 URHEIMAT ASIEN

the Hebrews were "only to be regarded as barbarians." In Kalthoff's

estimation, they did not possess adequate knowledge in science and art,
or the capacity in industry and trade, "to be counted amongst the cul-
tured, civilized nations." He calculated the "cultural level" of the He-
brews to be above "the utterly uneducated and truly barbarian peoples
of Asia, Africa, and Europe," but it was "still far behind many other
Oriental peoples such as the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Babylonians, and
Indians." The "overall character" of Hebrews lay "in diametrical oppo-
sition" to peoples who earn "the title of Hellenic-European Bil-
dung.,,19~

The distinction comparative-historical philologists drew between

the Indo- European and the Semitic cultural inheritance was by no
means set in stone in the first half of the nineteenth century. The de-
sire to find in language evidence supporting the monogenetic Christian
account of human origins led philologists to search for bridging mech-
anisms between Sanskrit and Hebrew. Lingering notions of an Ur-
sprache and of Old Testament notions of cultural difference endured
despite the secularizing effects of comparative-historical philology. The
characteristic features of the Indo-European language family and its
defining language, Sanskrit, continued to be associated with the quali-
ties of the divine first language or Ursprache once thought to have been
in existence before Babel. But these biblical references were increas-
ingly being put to use in a new cultural and ethnic understanding of
modern Germans' descent from an Indo-European homeland, how-
ever, that emphasized exclusive linguistic communities and a polyge-
netic model of human dispersal. As German Orientalists narrowed their
understanding of the exclusive original population and homeland of
their ancestors, their notion of German nationhood assumed a new
tocus on ethnicity and shared historical descent. By 1830 scholars had
proclaimed the existence of an exclusive "Indo-Germanic" language
tamily whose members were distinguished from unrelated speakers of
Chinese and Semitic languages. The superior cultural forms of this cho-
sen people were depicted in opposition to an internal, Orientalized
other who lacked the cultural and religious traditions to become full
members of the German nation.
With the articulation of distinct Indo- European and Semitic lan-
guage families, the implications that a comparative-historical approach
to Oriental studies would have for German conceptions of nationhood
had not yet run their course. After 1830 the term "Aryan" took hold

HI
 CHAPTER 2

within the discipline as an alternative designation for "Indo-Ger-

manic," and the role of language in defining cultural difference ex-
panded to include a racialist element that linked language, nationality,
and human communities in more rigidly hierarchical formations. The
idea that Germans were a chosen people and a nation acting out the
historical drama of salvation was tied more closely to notions of racial
purity, territorial expansion, and cultural superiority. Before the trans-
formation of Indo-Germans into Aryans can be examined, though, two
competing notions of the German national heritage-one Germanic
and one Hellenic-need to be situated in relation to the Orientalist
model.

112
 3
Urvolk GermDfliD
Historicizing Language and the Nation
in German Philologq, 1806-72

I n the dismal winter of 1807-8, the idealist philosopher Johann Gott-

lieb Fichte (1762-1814) delivered several lectures in a series called
Addresses to the German Nation to sparse noontime audiences in the
aula of the Berlin Academy. The city had been occupied by Napoleon's
soldiers, Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III had fled to K6ngisberg,
and Fichte had been compelled to reconcile a new Francophobia with
the otherwise universalistic aspirations of his theory of knowledge. His
lectures presented plans for a German national education based on J.
G. Herder's assumption that the "sum total of the sensuous and men-
tal lite of the nation" was "deposited in language." Germans would
persevere and be resilient in the face of French aggression, Fichte as-
sured his audience, because they were an "Urvolk," a primordial peo-
ple, distinguished even within the larger family of Germanen by the
"greater purity of their descent." In contrast to "Neo-Latin peoples"
such as the French, Germans still spoke "the original language of the
ancestral stock" and resided in the "original fatherland." Romance lan-
guages, conversely, were "dead at the root" because the introduction
of Latin had severed their speakers' ties to the distant past. For Fichte,
the strength of German culture and philosophy derived from the supe-
riority of a language "whose life extends back to the first moment it is-

113
 CHAPTER 3

sued from the force of nature," and he urged the nation to rally around
its most precious possession. I
Historicizing the German nation as an Urvolk whose youthful
language preserved pure cultural ties to antiquity was a rhetorical strat-
egy common to patriots of the Napoleonic period. During the French
occupation language acquired new significance as a marker of national-
ity and political allegiance. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn,
Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Heinrich Luden all publicized the notion
that the nation's vitality lay in its stalwart mother tongue and that cul-
tural education in its literary expressions and history was crucial to
strengthening German nationhood. Their emphasis on the au-
tonomous historical development of the German language propagated
anti -French sentiment by evoking a genealogy distinct from that of Ro-
mance-speaking peoples. Since German humanists rediscovered Taci-
tus's Germania in 1457 and with it the heroic tale of Hermann the
Cherusker defeating the legions of Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg
Forest in 9 AD, recourse to a specifically Germanic past had been used
to shield northern Europe from perceived waves of Roman culture. By
the late eighteenth century, a number of resurrected literary works and
forgotten myths had succeeded in breaking the Mediterranean
monopoly on antiquity and in elevating the prestige of what appeared
to be a deep and noble northern past. 2 Jordanes's History of the Goths
suggested to Danish scholars that Europe had been populated from the
north, and late eighteenth-century translations of the Old Norse Eddas
convinced J. G. Herder and others that Scandinavia offered the Ger-
man genius a "treasure trove" that was "more appropriate than the
mythology of the Romans. ,,3
This chapter outlines a second model of German linguistic na-
tionhood, one built on a new valuation of the Germanic past over and
against classical antiquity. It shows how the process of historicizing the
German language enabled philologists to resurrect the primordial past
of a German Urvolk, while giving nostalgic witness to its dissolution
through time. The techniques of historical grammar developed by
Jacob Grimm (17S5-1865) helped identity the cultural starting point
of the first Ur-German speakers and trace their subsequent division
into different tribes and dialect groups. The diversity and political frag-
mentation of contemporary Germans, let alone speakers of more
broadly Germanic tongues, compelled these scholars to reconcile an
ideal of original linguistic unity with a reality of provincialism. And the

114
 URVOLK GERMANIA

chapter explores the different ways Protestant Germans from the north
and Catholics from the south, especially Johann Andreas Schmeller
(1785-1852), interpreted the relative authenticity and cultural value of
linguistic expressions that differed by region, confession, and class, as
well as those particular to women and rural populations. Reflections on
the antiquity and historical character of standard written High German
and German dialects responded to conflicts and differences within the
German states and in turn set expectations for how different linguistic
groups could participate in the nation.
For most of the nineteenth century, scholarship on the German
language took place within the broader literary field of German philol-
ogy-itself nominally distinct from, but closely entwined with, the
study of German law and history or Germanics. 4 The success with
which German philology established itself as a university discipline de-
pended on the degree to which the German states were willing to tol-
erate and then themselves mobilize nationalism as a political force.
Until the 1860s German language scholars maintained a largely oppo-
sitional stance to local princes as representatives of bureaucratic state
interests rather than the nation. The liberal-nationalist convictions of
German philologists slowed the creation of university chairs in the field,
as well as reforms at the secondary school level that would have pro-
duced a greater demand for academically trained teachers of German.
This chapter examines the intersection of German language scholarship
and the nationalist movement, tracing the gradual conversion of the
field to a relatively conservative defender of Prussian interests in the
years prior to unification in 187l.
The chapter likewise analyzes what impact a focus on the origins
and historical descent of the German language had for how the com-
munity of the nation was imagined. The historicization of language in
the early nineteenth century, it will be seen, changed the conditions of
linguistic community as they had been imagined by the language
purists and patriots of the eighteenth century. Rather than represent
speakers' ability to participate in a pragmatic network of communica-
tion and exchange, the German mother tongue came to symbolize
common descent from a northern homeland. Recourse to a common
set of origins appealed to nationalists at a time when their educated
middle-class audiences suffered from regional and professional frag-
mentation. Language provided a semblance of historical continuity that
gave credence to the new cultural memories and narratives of national

us
 CHAPTER 3

origin that defined the national elite. Yet celebrating a prehistoric Ur-
volk failed to address the very real problems nationalists faced in forg-
ing dialogue and unity among diverse regional populations who liter-
ally had trouble communicating across confessional and class lines. A
historical approach to language tended to emphasize the autonomy of
language as a being shaped by its formative origins, rather than its mal-
leability as a system of signs under the direction of free linguistic agents.

GRIMM'S LAW AND THE FIRST GERMANEN

Early attempts to historicize the German language transpired within a

larger antiquarian movement to document and preserve the national
past. s Inconsistent philological methods, however, hampered the pro-
cess of historical recovery. One of the brightest beacons illuminating
the Germanic past in the early nineteenth century was the Nibelungen-
lied, a southern German saga composed around 1200. Historical inter-
est in the text erupted in a brief euphoria in the 1770s after Johann
Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701-76)
published a newly discovered manuscript. The Swiss philologists
claimed the heroic Hohenstaufen period had been comparable to
Homeric Greece in its cultural production and impact on the German
national consciousness. 6 The exploits of Siegfried and Kriemhild of-
fered Protestant intellectuals a source of pre-Christian German reli-
gious beliefs from which to construct an explicitly national mode of
worship, while feeding the early Romantic appetite for the German
Middle Ages. 7 Often derided as amateur achievements by later philolo-
gists, reproductions of the saga aimed to reach a popular audience.
Early Germanists such as Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen
(1780-1856), who published the first of his five editions of the Ni-
belungenlied in 1805, rendered the epic's Middle High German into an
odd mixture of contemporary and archaic expressions. Antiquated lan-
guage preserved the historical ambience of the epic, in his view, yet
threatened the success of a modern transmission. Hagen indulged in a
"free reproduction," loosely transcribing incomprehensible passages
while preserving the marks of the epic's alterity.M These eHorts earned
him the first position in German antiquities at the newly founded uni-
versity in Berlin in 1810.
Scholarship on the German language provided an important
venue for the expression of nationalism in the Napoleonic period.

116
 URVOLK GERMANIA

friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852), for example, Turnvater to the

highly politicized gymnastic movement was also a founding member of
the Berlin Society for the German Language; his influential Deutsches
Volksthum (1810) recommended the study of language as a basis for
German cultural reconstruction; the purity and authenticity of lan-
guage offered an ideal foundation for nation building. 9 These organi-
zations offered a "northern" alternative to the classical ideal of Bil-
dung, recapturing physical aspects of Greek education ignored by
neohumanists, while celebrating Germanic military heroes such as the
valiant Hermann or the Swiss martyr Winkelried. After 1810 members
ofJahn's nationalist circle attended Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen's
lectures on the Nibelungenlied. Later academic Germanists, such as 1-
G. G. Biisching, Joseph Gorres, Hans Ferdinand MaBmann, the
Grimms, and Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben likewise understood
their studies to be in service of the fatherland. Many wore patriotic "old
German" dress: a long back overcoat with white collar, berets, beards,
and long hair parted down the middle. A "tent-and-field" edition of
the Nibelungenlied strengthened the resolve of volunteer soldiers dur-
ing the Wars of Liheration; the hrothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
likewise dedicated the proceeds from their edition of a twelfth-century
Swabian epic to Hessian troops.
As German philology acquired disciplinary rigor, von der Hagen
tell victim to a new vanguard of scholars. His pseudohistorical tran-
scriptions of the Nibelungenlied were, in the eyes of one 1823 critic,
nothing more than "glaring pretense ... and ostentation ... laziness
and the vague guesswork of a dilettante. ,,10 Hagen pursued no system-
atic study of language or grammar and knew Old German and Old
Norse only sufficiently enough to enable a basic understanding of the
literature. II His renditions, for example, replaced such sequences as
"harte balde" with "viel balde" (literally "much soon") which is under-
standable but incorrect. A more consistent translation would have sub-
stituted the contemporary word "sehr" (very) for "harte.,,12 For his
part, however, the early Germanist showed open condescension toward
those "renowned persons, even famous linguists" whose erudition was
"too much for them to handle.,,13 Such sticklers, he believed, suffered
from a "tlxed idea that language was stuck in time and specific to a
province," and sacritlced poetic finesse for linguistic accuracy. 14
Hagen's disregard for the historicity of language is not surprising
given the conventions of late eighteenth-century grammar. An anti-

117
 CHAPTER 3

quarian interest in Gothic and Old German was already present among
northern humanists such as Franciscus Junius (1589-1677); German
language scholars compiled rudimentary dictionaries and grammars
through the mid-eighteenth century, although without adequate atten-
tion to issues of sound change. By the last decades of the century, an
interest in practical and philosophical grammar had overshadowed this
historical approach. The primary concern of Enlightenment grammar-
ians, including Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766) and Johann
Christoph Addung, was to establish German as a language of academic
discourse equivalent to Latin. Their largely prescriptive works devel-
oped key terminology for classitying contemporary German and set
grammatical, lexical, and orthographic norms that standardized the
language. IS Although Adelung, in particular, believed grammatical
principles had to be understood in their historical evolution, there was
among early Germanists little attempt to reconstruct specific historical
states of the mother tongue.
German philology earned greater recognition at the university by
applying the critical methodology of classicists to the interpretation and
critical editing of medieval German texts. In 1805 Georg Friedrich Be-
necke (1762-1844), a student of the classicist C. G. Heyne, procured
the first post in German philology at the University of G6ttingen,
promising to expend equal philological rigor on the literature of the fa-
therland. Benecke argued that university instruction in German should
extend beyond the scant practical training in rhetoric, style, and aes-
thetics that had been available in the eighteenth century, offering
courses in the history of medieval German literature. Karl Lachmann
(1793-1851), his prodigy, similarly impressed the neohumanist estab-
lishment in 1816 by adapting to the Nibelungenlied the epic theory and
textual criticism exemplified in F. A. Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum
(1795). One of two joint chairs in classical and German philology, the
Berlin professor set the standards for the critical, historical interpreta-
tion of German literature and for the editing of Middle High German
texts. His disciplined editions and equally demanding personality ban-
ished from the field perceived dilettantes such as von der Hagen, whose
questionable "modernizations" of the Nibelungenlied contributed as
much to the saga's popularity as to the lowly reputation suffered by
early Germanists.
The invention of historical grammar-which was the most dra-
matic achievement of early German language scholars-responded,

118
 URVOLK GERMANIA

however, to precedents within comparative philology. German lan-

guage study tailored itself more closely to the methods and concerns of
Orientalists than to the techniques of classical scholars. The two fields
shared a concern for origins and early history that students of Greek
dismissed as insignificant on aesthetic and moral grounds. Compara-
tivists likewise legitimated the study of "barbarian" antiquity by depriv-
ing ancient Greek of its pretensions to being the ideal or primordial lan-
guage. As Jacob Grimm recalled in 1854, Greek once loomed over all
other tongues "as an unattainable ideal." But once confronted with
Sanskrit, philologists had to recognize that language as a "still more
perfect paragon of language, perhaps the purest, of the highest antiq-
uity. ,,16 German was placed on more equal footing with the classical lan-
guages once Orientalists deemed its archaic forms to be equivalent in
age to ancient Greek and perhaps more proximate to the common
Indo- European mother than its southern neighbor.
Having read Franz Bopp and Friedrich Schlegel, Jacob Grimm
likewise acknowledged that the first Europeans had likely migrated
westward from Asia into Scandinavia. Grimm, in fact, confided in the
preface to the German Grammar (1819) that he would have preferred
to have written a comparative history that included all members of the
Indo-European family. Citing his inadequate knowledge of the lan-
guages involved, Grimm relinquished this project to the Danish Ger-
manist Christian Rasmus Rask (1787-1832), who was at the time mak-
ing his way through eastern Russia on an extended trip to India. l ?
Nevertheless, the desire to discover when the first Germanen broke off
from the larger Indo- European family and to identify what distin-
guished them from the neighboring Slavs, Franks, Greeks, and Lithua-
nians permeates Grimm's most important linguistic study. Published in
four volumes from 1819 to 1837, the German Grammar established
the framework for historical linguistics in a way that Bopp's On the
Conjugation System of Sanskrit (1816) had done for eomparativism. It
recounted a history of the grammatical changes that shaped the Ger-
manic languages from their first appearance to the present, arguing for
their original unity and setting standards for judging the relative antiq-
uity of documented linguistic forms.
The experience of Napoleonic occupation motivated Grimm's
historical sensibility, as it did his devotion to the language, literature,
and popular culture of the German Volk. When French troops entered
his home city of Kassel, the tradition of Roman law that he had pur-

119
 CHAPTER 3

sued as a student of Friedrich Karl von Savigny now seemed tainted by

foreign intluence. 18 Grimm left a post in the legal profession and dove
into the study of Old German literature and folklife. Having procured
a position as the private librarian of King Jerome Bonaparte, he pub-
lished with his brother Wilhelm the Altdeutsche Wiilder (1813-15). In
the tradition of other Romantic collections such as Des Knaben Wun-
derhorn, the serial offered excepts and short commentaries on German
folk poetry, fairy tales, epics, and folk songs. In the wake of the French
Revolution, conservative thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig
Tieck, Novalis, and W. H. Wackenroder had sought to revive the spir-
itual integrity and political stability of the Holy Roman Empire. 19 Their
medievalism celebrated the Catholic church and its artistic expressions
as a means of resurrecting the ethical, religious, and social ideals at-
tacked by rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment. The feudal struc-
tures and paternal government of the medieval Hapsburg monarch ap-
peared to be the only institutions capable of checking the revolutionary
spirit and guaranteeing the return of Germany's greatness.
For Protestant scholars of the Napoleonic era, the model of na-
tional life offered by the High Medieval period verged too closely on
an acceptance of Catholic Austria and absolutist political structures.
The early Germanic tribes offered a tradition of political freedom, aus-
tere virtue, and participatory government that was older and therefore
presumably more authentic than Hapsburg imperial rule. Protestant in-
tellectuals likewise regarded the recovery of a "native" pre-Christian
mythology as central to the reassertion of a German Volk. 20 For
Friedrich Schlegel, the discovery of a primordial revelation in India had
reinforced a commitment to Catholicism and conservative nationalism.
Research on Norse and Germanic mythology linked the pagan faith of
the earliest Germanic tribes to the "German" Christianity of the Refor-
mation. Uniquely German heroes, myths, and legends provided Protes-
tant Germans with a native religious imagery nol dependent on the
"foreign" myths of the Bible or the superstition of Roman Catholi-
cism. 21 For this reason, the search for a primordial German Ursprache
was largely the preserve ofliberal-nationalists and Protestants.
While collecting material for a volume of Fairy Tales (1812) and
a history of the German saga (1816), Jacob and his brother Wilhelm
thought they had uncovered remnants of a pre-Christian primordial
faith or Urmythus. Similarities in the narrative core of these stories and
the repetition of poetic motifs across time and space pointed, in their

120
 URVOLJ( GERMANIA

minds, to a shared primordial revelation. The Grimms undertook com-

parative studies of mythology that drew in such diverse sources as the
Arabian Nights and Hindu legends in an attempt to ascertain an orig-
inal theme that dated to the dawn of time. There were alluring paral-
lels, the brothers observed, between the diffusion of religious beliefs
and the spread of languages described by Friedrich Schlegel. 22 When
August Wilhelm Schlegel sharply reprimanded the brothers that identi-
cal poetic motifs could appear independently without their having de-
rived from an Urmythus) Jacob turned to language as the only sure
foundation for reconstructing prehistoric genealogies.
The choice of language as a conduit into the Germanic past re-
sponded to Grimm's disillusionment with the failure of the Congress of
Vienna to give cultural and political form to the recovered historical
memory of an authentic German national identity. After returning from
the deliberations in Austria, Grimm, as John E. Toews has shown, de-
vised a theory of cultural development that purported to explain the
historical distance separating the present from an authentic, yet alien-
ated native past, while at the same time holding out a lifeline linking
contemporaries to a pure moment of national origin. The German lan-
guage in its historical evolution seemed to reveal the deep structures of
German identity and yet to bear the telling marks of the type of cultural
transformation and change that contingent historical events could in-
flict on an original essence. 23 Language also appealed to Grimm as the
cultural form with the most intimate connection to a preexisting na-
tional spirit; in his view, other cultural expressions such as literature,
folktales, and myth all built upon the structures of the language in
which they took shape. 24
Actual research into archaic forms of language was made possible
by Grimm's extensive study of medieval manuscripts. That Grimm
served as served as a librarian for thirty years of his life, turning down
numerous university positions before accepting an offer at Gbttingen in
1829, indicates how important the availability of medieval sources was
to acquiring a historical appreciation oflanguage. The majority of Ger-
manists active between 1800 and 1850 served as librarians at some
point in their careers, undertaking extended trips in search of
manuscripts and collecting them privately.25 The critical editions issued
in the late eighteenth century and radically improved in the next
decades under the influence of classical philology's exacting textual
methods were a necessary basis for reconstructing earlier stages of the

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 CHAPTER 3

German language. Correctly discerning the end rhymes of Old German

verses, for example, enabled researchers to document archaic words
with more precision. Grimm's own editions of medieval texts, his prose
transcriptions, and the historical view of legal terminology he gained
while working on "Concerning Poetry in Law" (1816), made possible
the observations offered in the German Grammar.
Nevertheless, until 1816 Jacob Grimm had only vague notions of
the development of German linguistic forms and engaged in a specula-
tive type of etymology whose validity had been made obsolete by ad-
vances in the new field of comparative philology. The prior existence of
an Ursprache (or universal language) that lived on in all national
tongues, Grimm once believed, justified using any words from any lan-
guage to explain others that sounded alike. 2" Two events combined to
change this perspective. In his critical review of the Altdeutsche Walder,
August Wilhelm Schlegel accused the brothers of replicating the "chaos
of Babel" in their studies. "Whoever brings such etymologies to light,"
he insisted, "[ is] still a foreigner to even the most basic principles oflin-
guistic research." He advised Grimm that it would be impossible to
achieve an adequate understanding of ancient Germanic texts "without
knowledge of grammar,,,27 a reproof that the recipient took painfully to
heart. The discovery of the so-called i- Umlaut in Middle High German
likewise gave Jacob confidence in the regularities of grammatical struc-
ture and showed him the importance of sound in language. In 1816
Grimm observed a specitlc change in the development of certain words
over time, namely that the vowel "a" becomes an "e" in the root sylla-
ble of words, if in Old High German or Old Saxon an "i" or a "j" fol-
lowed in the end syllable. 2x Knowing how to track regular changes in
linguistic forms hastened the completion of the German Grammar two
years Iater. 2"
A historical approach to language had already facilitated the com-
parison of languages in other contexts by uncovering obscured ele-
ments certain tongues once held in common. Friedrich Schlegel, for
example, drew on "old monuments of the Germanic language" such as
Gothic, Old Saxon, and Icelandic to prove the similarity of case end-
ings in modern German and Sanskrit.'o Rasmus Rask's prize essay on
Icelandic, A Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse Tongue (1811), had
a more immediate impact on Grimm. The Danish Academy of Sciences
had held a competition aimed at establishing the linguistic forms of
proto-Nordic. In an entry that Grimm reviewed in 1811 Rask insisted

122
 URVOLK GERMANIA

that a defensible prehistoric stage of language could be reconstructed.

This prospect likely inspired Grimm to break with earlier German
grammars, such as the one compiled by Johann Christoph Adelung in
1781, that erected an edifice of norms and rules to codifY contempo-
rary forms of the language.
As Bopp had done for the Indo-European language family,
Grimm uncovered the "linguistic organism" that united Germanic
tongues. While Bopp's work was primarily comparative and assumed
that the grammatical structure of language had a certain independence
from historical change, Grimm's analysis was in the first instance ge-
netic. "The grammatical structures of the present can only be estab-
lished historically," Grimm insisted, "every word has its own history
and lives its own life.,,31 The German Grammar established that "the
branches of the Germanic language family" shared a common set of
grammatical principles that pointed to their mutual evolution from a
single, prehistoric tongue. 32 Grimm used the word "deutsch" in the
sense in which Germanic (or Teutonic) is used today and included in
his study Gothic, the Nordic languages, Low German languages such
as Saxon, Angle, and Frisian, as well as Old and Middle High German. 33
The choice of this terminology in the grammar and subsequent works
was designed to recall that New High German was of the same origin
as related tongues and correctly reflects the central importance of the
language in Grimm's definition of the family. It was an affront to Ras-
mus Rask, however, who feared the term "deutsch" diminished the im-
portance of Scandinavian languages and himself preferred ''gotisk,''
which Grimm rejected as too narrow. 34
The "fundamental and exclusive characteristic" that defined
membership in the Germanic language family was for Grimm a series of
regular vowel modifications in the syllables of words as they are built
up and assume grammatical function in a sentence. 35 In his view, the
Germanic languages were distinguished from other Indo-European
tongues by their use of the Ablaut and Umlaut in the inflection of
words. Grimm introduced these designations into German grammar
and distinguished between so-called strong and weak verb declensions,
conventions still followed in language instruction today.-'6 The term
Ablaut refers to a series of regular vowel changes that Grimm derived
from the conjugation of strong verbs but that also extend into other as-
pects of the Germanic languages. Among the strong verbs, changes in
the vowel are used to signifY tense. For example, the infinitive "binden"

123
 CHAPTER 3

(to bind) inflects to assume the form "band" in the past and ''gebun-
den" in the past participle. This Ablaut is the defining feature of strong
verbs; according to Grimm, it was their "soul." But similar changes can
also be seen in the formation of derivative nouns, in this case in the
variations "die Binde" (the bandage), "das Band" (the bond or tie),
and "der Bund" (the bundle ):17
Grimm proposed that those verbs distinguished by their regular
use of internal vowel modification to signifY tense were constitutive of
the family and not, as commonly assumed, peculiar exceptions to the
more prevalent form of conjugation in New High German. The defin-
ing feature of the more common weak verbs is their appension of reg-
ular inflectional endings to the stem to form the past tense, as in the in-
finitive "hoffin" (to hope) which inflects as "hoffte" in the past and
''gehofft'' in the past participle. Grimm believed that the strong verbs
"directly reveal [ed] . . . the profound, pensive order of the linguistic
spirit [Sprachgeist]," and he revered the Ablaut as the living force be-
hind the language. 38 In his analysis, systematic vowel changes lay at "the
foundation of all Germanic word formation," the Umlaut being an-
other modification typical of the Germanic languages. 39
This association of vowel inflection with the authentically Ger-
manic was reinforced by Grimm's discovery of the archaic, primordial
nature of this grammatical form. Grimm interpreted the Ablaut as
being characteristic of "the truly oldest form of conjugation," having
evolved in a historical period before the first writers. 4o In his view,
strong verbs were relics of older, more organic linguistic forms and
could be used as a measure for tracking the gradual degeneration of
language. Grimm identified three "gradations" of the Germanic lan-
guages based on the decreasing frequency with which the Ablaut des-
ignated grammatical function. 41
The question of when Germanic speakers emerged as a Volk dis-
tinct from their Indo-European neighbors was not broached until the
second edition of the Grammar, published in 1822.42 The new 596-
page section "On Letters" detailed the separation of the Germanic lan-
guages from the larger Indo-European family with reference to sound
changes that evolved historically in a particular series of consonants.
Grimm discerned in the composition of Germanic root words a "dou-
ble sound shift that has important consequences for the history of the
language and for the stringency of etymology." Since 1837 this has
been known as "Grimm's Law." It specified that "just as Old High

124
 URVOLK GERMANIA

German has sunk down a level in all three grades from Gothic, so did
Gothic itself sink down a level from Latin (Greek, Indic).,,43 Grimm
took those consonants appearing in the roots of Greek, Sanskrit, and
Latin words to exemplifY constructions shared by the common ances-
tor of all Indo-European languages and showed that in the first Ger-
manic languages roots of similar meaning were built using an alterna-
tive series of consonants. Secondly, he demonstrated that consonants in
Old High German had undergone a second series of modifications that
distinguished the language from what is now known as Proto-Ger-
. 44
mamc.
To show the systematic nature of these consonant shifts, Grimm
devised several tables. 45 In each case, those sounds typical of the com-
mon ancestor of western Indo- European languages are shown to evolve
into an alternative set first in Proto-Germanic and then again in Old
High German:

Table 1

Greek P. B. F. T. D. TH. K. G. CH.

Gothic F. P. B. TH. T. D. K. G.
Old High German B(V) F. P. D. Z. T. G. CH.K.

A secondary table showed changes in guttural consonants as they ap-

peared in Latin:

Table 2

Latin c g h
Gothic h,g k g
Old High German h,g ch k

When contextualized in the written word, these sound changes are

more comprehensible. For example, the evolution of the word for
"you" which in Latin is "tu," in Gothic "1>," and in Old High German
"du," shows the progressive shift in T to TH to 0; as it evolves from
Latin "ego" to Gothic "ik" to New High German "ich" the word for
"I" reveals the change in G to K to CH.46

125
 CHAPTER 3

The first Germanic sound shift indicated to Grimm that the earli-
est Germans had broken otT from the other western branches of the
Indo-European family and emerged as a "nation" some time before the
Christian era. The second or High German sound shift was believed to
have taken place between the first and eighth centuries AD and to have
separated speakers of the West Germanic languages into a High and
Low German group. Practically, Grimm's observations enabled philol-
ogists to use etymology more accurately when tracing the historical de-
velopment oflinguistic forms. In his words, it was no longer a question
of demonstrating the "equivalence or affinity of generally related con-
sonants" but of recognizing "historical levels of gradation that cannot
be displaced or reversed. ,,47 Etymology evolved from being more or less
subjective guesswork to a science that enabled a precise genealogy of
language. For example, after Grimm's Grammar, the New High Ger-
man word for "head" (Kopf) could no longer be derived from the
Latin "caput" despite the similarities in their sound and meaning.
Rather, the German word" Haupt" must be seen as the true derivative
of the Latin having gone through the C-H,G-H,G transition in its
Gothic and Old High German forms.4R
As presented in the German Grammar, Grimm's sound shifts at-
tributed to language an autonomous internal principle of organic
growth that itself defined communities of speakers. For Grimm, the
inner life of language consisted in a subjective agent embodying itself
in external forms.49 This implied that the type of community formation
at work in the emergence of the German nation transpired almost as a
function of language itself. According to Grimm, language change
charted a path of progressive decline through history, its forms appear-
ing "more noble" and "purer" the further they reached back toward
Gothic in the pre-Christian era. 50 He imagined the linguistic perfection
found at the moment of origin to consist in language merging with the
world so that virtually no gap existed between words and things.'1 As
language matured, it acquired more mediated, abstract, and conceptual
forms, mirroring the evolution of Natur- to Kunstpoesie. This raised
the prospect of modern speakers self-consciously manipulating the ob-
served gap between language and the world, as that between a lost na-
tional essence and the present. According to Toews, Grimm was not
prepared in the 1820s to envision integrating more authentic linguistic
forms into the structures of modern High German. Rather, as his sub-
sequent work German Legal Antiquities (1828) indicates, a native tra-

126
 URVOLK GERMANIA

dition of German law appeared to offer a more appropriate social and

political form for unitying the linguistic community. 52 Nevertheless, the
continued presence in language of an original moment of cultural for-
mation theoretically had the power to unite modern Germans in a
shared linguistic community once this continuity was recognized.
Grimm's grammar notably celebrated New High German as the
most authentic and original of the existing Germanic languages by re-
vealing that it had participated to a much lesser degree in the general
shift from synthetic to analytic structures than other members of the
family. Contemporary scholars still describe German as being linguisti-
cally conservative because it retained more of the grammatical com-
plexities of Proto-Germanic than English or Dutch. 53 Grimm inter-
preted the relative youth of standard written High German as a sign of
the nation's vitality and strength. German developed its written norms
late, according to Grimm, and was therefore still young and vital when
ancient Greek and Latin crystallized into fixed literary forms. No other
nation, in his view, had a two-thousand-year linguistic history in which
to take pride, nor could another people match the "raw but healthy
power of Germans" who had brought the Roman Empire to its knees. 54
Defining the linguistic community based on its members' shared
historical descent from a pure Urvolk represented a break with the im-
portance Enlightenment scholars placed on creating a democratic dis-
cursive order of exchange. Eighteenth-century language purists advo-
cated standardizing the spoken vernacular in an attempt to democratize
social and political discourse; the literary public sphere was to be open
to all who mastered the rules of engagement. For nineteenth-century
nationalists, the vernacular no longer signified the possibility of mutual
intelligibility among social groups who mastered its forms, but an ex-
clusive ancestry and cultural legacy. In Grimm's conception, the unity-
ing power of language no longer lay in the efficacy with which words
and grammatical forms promoted mutual understanding or a pragmatic
network of communicative relationships. Rather, the binding force of
language derived from its evoking memories of a collective, primordial
origin. Speakers of Germanic tongues were drawn together by the com-
mon experience of breaking away from the Indo-European language
family. They were to recognize their affinity in the unique linguistic
structures that resulted from this separation and were still preserved in
each of the Germanic tongues.

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 CHAPTER 3

REGIONALISM AND DIALECTS: J. A. SCHMELLER

Imagining a national community self-consciously united by awareness

of its shared linguistic descent was little more than wishful thinking in
1822. The decade between the Wars of Liberation and the Hambach
Festival of 1832 marks a lull in the nationalist movement. German na-
tionalism had limited popular appeal in the first half of the nineteenth
century due to the strength of other loyalties and identities, whether
confessional, regional, occupational, or state-based." The diversity of
languages and dialects spoken across the German Confederation, Scan-
dinavia, and the TDW COllntries literally prevented the supposed de-
scendents of Grimm's Germanic Urvolk from communicating across
state lines. If a national language is a dialect with an army and a navy,
modern German had neither before 1871. Even educated speakers of
standard written High German retained such strong regional variations
in pronunciation that understanding traveling theater groups could be
difficult. 56 Nineteenth -century Germanists needed mechanisms to rec-
oncile a broad definition of the linguistic community with the reality of
local populations who had little affinity for standardized written or spo-
ken tongues.
Local dialects brought the actual diversity and fragmentation of
the German linguistic community into sharp contrast with a historical
ideal of unity. Jacob Grimm himself appreciated that dialects had pre-
served the contact between language and concrete forms of life. 57 Bllt
they also seemed to divide German speakers with the result that neither
of the Grimm brothers studied dialects formally. "Only by virtue of our
written language do we Germans feel the bond of our descent and
community to be alive," Grimm cautioned in the German Grammar,
"and no tribe can believe to have paid too high a price for such an ad-
vantage. ,,58 Jacob welcomed that in the sixteenth century a standard
written form of New High German supposedly vanquished "all signs of
earlier tribal difference."'" To mitigate linguistic divisions, he even pro-
posed redistributing local expressions in dialect throughout German-
speaking Europe. 6o Grimm considered independent national tongues,
such as Dutch or Swedish, to be mere "dialects within the greater Ger-
manic family."'" The terms Dialekt and Mundart (idiom) could also
refer to much smaller regional vernaculars, such as Swabian, rural or
urban idioms, or slang peculiar to a social class. The Grimms spoke
High German at home, although with a provincial intonation, and the

128
The Bavarian dialectologist Johann Andreas Schmeller in 1849.
 CHAPTER 3

brothers lacked sufficient knowledge to speak or edit even the local

Hessian dialect. 62
The founder of modern dialectology in Germany, Johann Andreas
Schmeller, a contemporary and colleague of Grimm, likewise embraced
as "altogether good and praiseworthy" that through standardized High
German "all provinces of Germany are more or less united by one sin-
gle shared language. ,,63 Along with Karl Lachmann, the two make up
the trinity of German philology's founding fathers and pioneered the
historical approach to grammar that dominated language study
through midcentury. But, as the fourth child of rural Bavarian basket
weavers and a speaker of dialect himself, Schmeller had a much more
sympathetic and practical approach to the difficulties vernacular idioms
posed toward national integration. His work, not surprisingly, also em-
phasized problems of sound change and phonetics that Grimm had ne-
glected in favor of the written word.
Schmeller and Grimm are interesting foils in the linguistic defini-
tion of nationhood because of their differing notions of community.
Grimm was rooted in Protestant northern Germany and turned to the
Nordic lands as a beacon of cultural rebirth. Schmeller was one of a
small minority of Germanists active outside of Prussia and the middle
German states. A Catholic with ties to the artisan class, he located the
nation's heart in a southern linguistic community that extended into
Austria and across the Alps. Schmeller's work on Bavarian idioms
aimed, moreover, at democratizing and making more inclusive the dis-
cursive community that defined the nation. He translated a historical
view oflanguage into an argument for the particular cultural contribu-
tions that dialect speakers made to the nation.
Schmeller's unique perspective stemmed from an untimely intel-
lectual trajectory that took a windy detour around Romanticism and its
adoration of the Volk. The association of peasants with origins and the
nation's creative soul could hold few illusions for a poor upstart who
joined Spanish mercenary troops in 1804 because his horne village of
Rimberg bei Pfaffenhofen offered few prospects. Talent and parental
initiative had enabled Schmeller to attend the Lyceum in Munich. He
never completed formal university education, but as a young man he
enjoyed the attention of the school's director, Cajetan Weiller. A lead-
ing figure of the Munich Enlightenment, Weiller instilled in his student
a practical pedagogical concern for improving the lot of disadvantaged
social groups, a calling that Schmeller understood in linguistic terms.

130
 URVOLK GERMANJA

Already as an eighteen-year-old, Schmeller reflected on the rela-

tionship between the spoken and written word and devised strategies
for alleviating the social disadvantages faced by speakers of dialect. His
essay "On Writing and Its Instruction" (1803) was an unsuccessful at-
tempt to enter the ranks of Bavarian literati, but it presented the inno-
vative argument that spoken dialects should not be considered deviant
forms of the standard written language to be dismissed with "ridicule
or ... despite." Rather, they should be approached as independent lan-
guages in their own right. Schmeller's plea was based on the new no-
tion that the prestige associated with the written word was a social and
historical "convention" with no linguistic foundation. 64 Writing, he
claimed, was simply "the art of making spoken language visible using
an alphabet"; language itself consisted of a system of sounds that ex-
isted independently of any text. 05 This insight enabled Schmeller to per-
ceive laws of linguistic change not apparent in written form. Even at
this early juncture, he recognized that the forms of the standard writ-
ten language were not sufficient to express the spoken word. When
transcribed, Schmeller feared, dialects "may assume the appearance of
a depraved written language, which in principle they are not."oo
The vernacular initially presented Schmeller with a pedagogical
problem. His essay suggested to teachers how they might break down
the barriers between the vernacular and the standard written language
and, in so doing, integrate speakers of nonstandard German into a
broader linguistic community. Schmeller did not wish to extinguish the
vernacular, but rather to acquaint students with standard High German
by relating it to the dialect with which they were familiar. His views
contradicted those of the majority of language teachers and researchers
still working within a seventeenth-century tradition that taught stan-
dard High German independently of the vernacular, and are surpris-
ingly modern in their approach.o7
During the Wars of Liberation, Schmeller's interest in vernacular
German took the same historical and nationalist turn that largely de-
prived the word Volk of its sociological dimensions among the Roman-
tics. By his own explanation, this change resulted from an expatriate
recognizing the German language as the only common bond uniting
his fatherland at a moment of crisis. When Bavaria joined the coalition
against Napoleon in 1813, Schmeller returned to enroll as a lieutenant
in a voluntary riflery battalion. He later recalled not being able to con-
ceal his "joyful amazement" to hear "so many sounds and expressions

131
 CHAPTER 3

in the cottages of the homeland" whose "tones had grown foreign to

my ear. ,,68 Remaining on active military duty after a triumphant march
to Paris, Schmeller devised a plan in consultation with the Munich li-
brarian Josef Scherer to compile a Bavarian dialectical dictionary simi-
lar to what Franz Josef Stalder had published for Switzerland in 1805. 69
"Language generally expresses the external and inner life of a nation,"
he argued to the Munich Academy of Sciences in 1816, but "the lan-
guage of books" only captures the life of those "estates [Stiinde] who
move in higher, studied forms." In his view the "natural life of the peo-
ple" was "only expressed in the vernacular [Volkssprache]. ,,70 His peti-
tion for funds to research Bavarian idioms was granted, and Schmeller
dedicated the next twenty-one years of his life to assembling material
for a Bavarian grammar (1821) and dictionary (1827-37).
Studies of local customs, histories, and antiquities contributed in
the early nineteenth century to a new set of narratives concerning re-
gional contributions individual German states made to the nation. 71
Schmeller's project was thus commensurate with broader nationalist as-
pirations. "If Germany is my fatherland, Bavaria is so, as wdl,,,n
Schmeller noted in May 1813; he felt bound by loyalties to both his
"narrow" and the "common German fatherland. ,,73 The scholar's abil-
ity to bridge provincial reality with a national agenda was at the same
time compromised by the service the grammar was to render the Bavar-
ian state. The decision to fund the project was one of several measures
the newly independent monarchy undertook to strengthen regional
loyalties after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. For this reason,
the scope of the Bavarian grammar and dictionary was artificially lim-
ited to the political boundaries of the Wittelsbach kingdom. Neither
study covered the entire region where Bavarian was spoken; this would
have extended beyond Altbayern to Austria and parts of Upper Palati-
nate and Bohemia. Schmeller ignored the dialects of Austria and Tyrol,
except those spoken around Salzburg, which was Bavarian during the
time of his research, but included treatment of the unrelated Alemanic,
Swabian, and Franconian dialects because such speakers lived within the
borders of the state.
The Bavarian Vernaculars built from the provincial to the na-
tional by documenting the historical proximity of the Bavarian dialects
to archaic and thus "authentic" German linguistic forms. Schmeller had
begun studying older versions of German while abroad and upon his
return was struck that spoken Bavarian "vividly reminded me of the

132
 URVOLK GERMANIA

J. A. Schmeller's mapping of the Bavarian dialects

in Die Mundarten Bayerns (1821).

language of German antiquity. ,,74 "Only the common man," he ob-

served, "especially in the country, and preferably in remote forested or
mountainous regions has preserved pure and vividly most of the above
mentioned analogies in pronunciation.,,75 In emulation of Grimm's
work, Schmeller's grammar structured the presentation of declension
and conjugation around phonological and sound changes. By strictly
separating written letters from their spoken values, something Grimm

133
 CHAPTER 3

failed to do, Schmeller proved that dialects developed in regular pat-

terns from older versions of a language, yet evolved independently of
its written forms. He showed, for example, that some Bavarian verbs re-
tained the use of vowel modification (the Ablaut) when conjugated, al-
though the standard written language had long since resorted to ap-
pending auxiliary particles. The past participle of the verb" deuten" (to
explain or signify), he noted, sometimes appeared in dialect as ''gedit-
ten" instead of ''gedeutet.'' This was evidence that "here, too, ... the
dialects have preserved something originary. ,,76
Linguistic historians debate the extent to which Schmeller's cor-
pus departed from the rationalist tradition of the eighteenth century;
the grammar displays certain synchronic tendencies characteristic of
general grammar. 77 This resulted from the author's trying to create a
standardized written form of the Bavarian dialects and to gain recogni-
tion of their equality with Latin and other European languages. 7R Nev-
ertheless, Schmeller demonstrated that German dialects could be used
to illuminate earlier linguistic periods and to reconstruct prehistory.
Philologists, he believed, could deduce "reliable traces in the living pre-
sent" of "what may have happened in the Germanic world and about
which history has little to disclose. ,,79 The idiomatic pronunciation of
place names, for example, tended to resemble their older forms more
closely than current written designations. He also maintained that di-
alect speakers had a special ability to comprehend the meanings of older
roots that he referred to as "living folk-etymology." Whereas the philol-
ogist had to research the derivation of unusual words, persons familiar
with the vernacular were "accustomed to knowing the meaning of cer-
tain parts of words and word formations that a language upholds ...
from century to century. "RO
Similar observations had been made about the antiquity of Swiss
German by Bodmer in the eighteenth century, and the grammarian J.
C. Adelung claimed the language of peasants still resembled Old High
German. 81 Similarly to 1. A. Schmeller, the Grimm brothers associated
regional German identities with more intimate ties to the Germanic
past. Six hundred years ago, Jacob Grimm wrote, "every common
peasant knew the perfection and elegance of the German language,
that is, he practiced them daily. ,,82 Even today, Grimm believed, the
meanings of root words were "preserved more truly by the folk than
in the written language. ,,83 Archaic languages were, in Grimm's view,
generally superior to living tongues because they displayed a greater

134
 URVOLK GERMANIA

variety of inflections, a richness of vowels and simple roots, and a syn-

thetic structure since lost to the present. Grimm nevertheless detected
in "the language of the common man a certain rawness and unruli-
ness. ,,84 Dialects had undergone a more drastic degeneration without
the mediating effect of poets and writers who added to the spiritual
and intellectual power of High German.
Dialects likewise had value for Grimm because they preserved the
regional specificity of the Heimat or homeland. The German Gram-
mar", for example, assumed an original identity of dialects and Germanic
tribes. Fears that Prussia might engulf Saxony as part of the settlement
agreed to at the Congress of Vienna (1815) had awakened in Jacob
Grimm the particular concern that the smaller Middle German states
could be sacrificed to their larger neighbors. In Grimm's view the de-
struction of their individuality would not aid the unification process,
but would rather detract from the vitality of the nation. As Jacob
Grimm confided to Savigny in 1814: "We feel ourselves to be Hessians
and want to stay so, and are in this way better Germans. ,,85 He believed
that history and the Volksgeist were most alive in Middle Germany: the
ancient division of the German nation into tribes was still visible here,
and geographically this region had been the center of the Old Reich. 86
Nevertheless, the fidelity with which dialects preserved the archaic
past and regional diversity was offset by their affiliation with the lower
social classes. Grimm's ambivalence toward dialects thus suggests the
limits of his professed populism. The German Grammar suggested that
as one tribe had gained dominance over another, it had imposed its lan-
guage on the subjugated people. Only "the noble part" of the popula-
tion adopted the new dialect of a conquering tribe, while the "native
vernacular flees among the masses," "sinks and becomes eommon.,,87
With time there emerged a few select, standard written languages now
shared by the educated descendents of the victorious Germanic tribes:
New High German, Dutch, English, Swedish, and Danish. The remain-
ing tongues had been condemned to the underclasses. For Grimm, di-
alects were thus comparable to "a comfortable house dress in which one
does not go out. "sa
Grimm's rejection of the German dialects suggests that the social
groups associated with vernacular idioms should literally not to come
into playas independent political actors in the nation. Grimm conceded
that the folk maintained closer ties to the Germanic past than the edu-
cated classes. In his mind peasants and artisans possessed originality, au-

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thenticity, and certain creative powers that were essential to the forma-
tion of a national consciousness and public opinion. The creators of
fairy tales and sagas, Grimm suspected, had an inborn love for the
Heimat, a healthy sense for family and the patriarchal order, respect for
religion, as well as a natural teel tor what is right and just:~ But he did
not believe that all people should share in the governing process. For
Grimm the state was principally a paternalistic apparatus of administra-
tion and government that, while it served the interests of the nation,
was independent of it. The historical sensibilities of the folk did not jus-
tifY bestowing political sovereignty on the people.
The community of German speakers that Johann Andreas
Schmeller envisioned was united by a more inclusive discursive order of
exchange. As a scholar and teacher, Schmeller considered it his duty to
involve underrepresented populations in the elite social and political life
of the nation. He dedicated the grammar to "everyone who wishes to
have contact with the common man"; it was intended to help school
teachers, priests, judges, and civil servants "lift the masses higher and
understand them. ,,~O Their right to participate was not dictated by a
special connection to the cultural starting point of the German nation,
but by the goal of promoting mutual understanding and communica-
tion. "I have not entirely lived tor nothing," Schmeller reflected, "even
if out of the law giver, world reformer, poet, etc. of my youthful
dreams, only a culler of words and a pedant has emerged. But it is note-
worthy to have made something out of nothing or at least out of the
lowest of the low, and to have brought the language of the Bavarian
farmer into the chambers of the very learned on the North and Baltic
Seas, yes even into the elegant chambers of important men." He cred-
ited himself with having earned "certain honors" for the only posses-
sion in which the rural inhabitants of Bavaria could take pride: their na-
tive language. Soon, he hoped, one would consider it "atrocious ... to
disinherit them of all the other goods of life. ,,91
At a time when the diversity of German speakers and the
sovereign powers of the states severely compromised the nationalist
movement, Schmeller's linguistic history from below may have offered
a more useful model for communal integration than the prospect of
shared historical descent. Basing national unity on the written bond of
standardized High German held little attraction for the manifold speak-
ers of German dialects. Schmeller's grammar forged ties between the
actual mother tongue of Bavarians and the High German spoken by the

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 URVOLK GERMANIA

educated elite. The conditions he outlined for the formation oflinguis-

tic community, mutual comprehension, and participation in a demo-
cratic discursive order of exchange were, however, Enlightenment con-
cepts that were increasingly sidelined by the importance Grimm and
other German philologists attributed to shared historical descent from
a Germanic UrJJolk.

GERMAN FAMILIES AND THE MOTHER TONGUE

The close supervision of German universities during the Restoration

posed a difficult environment for the establishment of German philol-
ogy as an academic field. By 1830 there were only six university profes-
sorships in German language and literature. 92 The suppression of polit-
ical dissent enabled by the Karlsbad Decrees ( 1819) targeted nationalist
gymnastic associations such as those founded by the Germanist Hans
ferdinand MaBmann in Jena and Breslau. Having stood trial for initi-
ating the burning of un-German books at the Wartburg festival, MaB-
mann was arrested again in 1819 and 1823, and his papers were con-
fiscated by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Like other potentially
subversive instructors, he was banned from further teaching and en-
tered into exile. One fourth of all Germanists active in the first half of
the nineteenth century suffered similar political or legal persecution.'1l
The secondary schools likewise failed to offer a venue for cultivating
nationalism. 94 German instruction at the gymnasium level had few ties
to the more politicized, nationalistic field of university Germanics. The
university course of study was not designed to prepare future teachers,
and recipients of advanced degrees in German did not seek employ-
ment in secondary schools.
Under these circumstances, language scholars often imagined the
nation taking form in upper-middle-class homes, publicizing their his-
torical reconstructions in literary collections and reference works de-
signed for private use. The bourgeois household was an important so-
cial space for the construction of German nationhood given limitations
on middle-class participation in economic and politicallife."o Members
of the bourgeoisie distinguished themselves by upholding certain val-
ues and cultural models of behavior; the social signs and symbolic lan-
guage cultivated in discussions of literature or art provided cohesion at
a time when the middle class was regionally and professionally still quite
diverse. 96 The Grimms' Fairy Tales is only the best known of the texts
that presented families with images of "authentic" German traditions

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 CHAPTER 3

and folklife, while reinforcing bourgeois notions of domesticity and

gendered social roles. Anniversary celebrations of historical events or
the lives of "great" poets also strengthened the national consciousness
of the elite by creating shared memories of a collective past. 97 During
this period, moreover, the nation often appeared as a "folk family," in
which men and women assumed roles parallel to those they filled in the
patriarchic home.9X As the carriers of early German nationalism, mem-
bers of the educated bourgeoisie imposed their own conceptions of
gender and sexual difference on the nation. 99
Gendered conceptions of the nation and family overlapped with
the gendering of language in German philology. For one, the historical
trajectory carved by the German language followed gendered patterns.
The earliest stages of language Jacob Grimm associated with a primal
maternal power that was expressed in vowel sounds and verbs; he saw
this reflected in the prevalence of three" Ur-vowels" (a, i, u) in ancient
Indian words. wo Malleable and soft, vowels represented an illusive cre-
ative energy. The masculine and acculturating forces of consonants and
grammar were needed to give it form in words.")! Women's influence
on the development of language was likewise restricted to the begin-
ning of time. Women had created separate feminine and masculine de-
clensions by "cultivating their own customs and stating positions that
were independent of men.,,102 This gendering of language represented
for Grimm the extension of a natural order onto cultural forms. The di-
vision of nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter originated in a
"fantastical extension of natural relations onto all other objects. ,,103
Masculine nouns were "the more lively, powerful, and primordial";
feminine words were "later, more nimble, busy, malleable, and repro-
ductive. ,,104 Even personal names for men and women, Grimm sus-
pected, derived respectively from terms applied to animals and plants. lOS
A shifting balance in the internal gender composition of language
signaled the historical transformation of language from a primordial
force of nature to a cerebral tool of mankind. According to Grimm,
Old German had once been "corporal, sensuous, full of innocence,"
but with time the language had "gradually sought to suspend her na-
ture." "The corporal decline" of language was not an absolute loss,
though.IO" Rather, Grimm discerned a parallel "spiritual ascent" of lan-
guage that followed the progressive "education of mankind." The lan-
guage of the present, he surmised, "is working toward being more spir-
itual and abstract; it sees pretense and ambiguity in words, which it tries

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 URVOLK GERMANIA

to avoid at all costS ... ; its expressions are becoming clearer, more con-
.
SClOUS
. ,,107 Language, 111
an d more preclse. . otIler word s, was matunng .
"with honor to manhood. ,,108 If in an earlier period German was closer
to nature and the sensual, it was now ripe for the abstract and concep-
tual thought of men. He praised, in particular, Luther's translation of
the Bible for giving High German "male bearing and force. ,,109
The language spoken by women did not participate in this histor-
ical trajectory. Women remained incapable of self-consciously wielding
the power of words. Like the folk, women supposedly retained the in-
stinctive relationship to language that characterized the historical pe-
riod of Naturpoesie. In their daily speech, women made unconscious
use of grammatical principles and displayed knowledge of archaic roots
that had otherwise been lost. They embodied their "own, living gram-
mar" and for that reason had no use for teachers or the scientific study
of language. I 10 Domestic areas were thus ideal sites of cultural transmis-
sion. The entire realm of the feminine-women, children, the home,
and also the folk-was believed to have maintained more authentic
connections to an original, unadulterated form of Germanic culture,
one not directly accessible to educated men.
The gendering of language and linguistic ability literally assigned
women the task of giving their children "speech with the mother's
milk." It was the responsibility of mothers to transmit the "instinctive
secret" that Grimm believed "in tuned our vocal organs for the charac-
teristic sounds of the fatherland, its declensions, idioms, severities, or
softness." In teaching young children to talk, women were the first to
evoke in German speakers "that indestructible feeling of longing" that
resonated among members of the nation when they encountered arti-
facts of the German past. III As such, women's participation in the na-
tion was limited to the family, providing raw cultural material that men
then mastered. Katerina Viehmann (1755-1815), the model storyteller
from whom the Grimm brothers collected the majority of their fairy
tales, represented this ideal of feminine cultural transmission. She was,
however, not a peasant transmitter of oral folk tradition, but a literate
member of a large Huguenot community settled ncar Kassel. lI2
The preface to the German Dictionary ( 1854) offered a snapshot
of the ideal gendered use of language within domestic life, as Grimm
imagined it. Despite its scholarly apparatus, Grimm expected this "sa-
cred monument to the German people" to become a "household ne-
cessity" that educated families read aloud "with devotion" like the

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 CHAPTER 3

Bible. "[W]hy should the father not select a few words," he wondered,
"and, going through them with his boys in the evening, test their
knowledge of the language while he refreshes his own?" "[T]he
mother," Grimm added, "would gladly listen in." He elaborated: "with
their healthy mother's wit and their memory for good maxims, women
often carry with them a true desire to exercise their unspoiled feeling
for language." Women, he believed, would most often return to the
pages of the book in the course of the day as they lyrically rhymed a
known word with one less familiar and endeavored to fill gaps in their
knowledge. In this way, the dictionary would instill in literate German
men and women a more vital understanding of the "worth and ... su-
periority" of their mother tongue. The literary references cited in each
definition would likewise awaken readers' "love for native literature"
and introduce them to a common body of great German works.11.l
Even during the politically restrictive Restoration, myths of cul-
tural origin and descent reached an educated audience and prepared
the middle class to conceive of a national community that extended be-
yond state borders and warranted a formal constitution. 114 The home,
not the public school, was initially the space where the ideology of a na-
tional mother tongue spread. German language instruction was slow to
establish itself at the gymnasium level during the Vormtirz. No manda-
tory testing of German teachers existed until 1831 ,when the Kingdom
of Hannover required candidates for secondary school posts to have
historical knowledge of German. 115 German lessons were most often
entrusted to masters of Greek and Latin, and former students recalled
their instruction as un methodological and unorganized. 116 Not until
the 1840s did the study of German include composition and literary
analysis, skills generally relayed by classicists. 117 Members of the bour-
geoisie resisted training in the mother tongue because they associated
it with the polytechnic, practical municipal schools of the artisan and
working classes. II~ This aversion hindered the development of univer-
sity Germanics, while confining the nationalist sentiments of the field
to elite circles.

LINGUISTIC NATIONS IN THE NORTH AND SOUTH

The linguistic genealogies created by nineteenth-century philologists

bear traces of the same regional fault lines that divided the German na-
tionalist movement. Until delegates to the Frankfurt national assembly
reluctantly voted for a small-German (kleindeutsch) solution to unifica-

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 URVOLK GERMANIA

tion in 1848, excluding Austria and eventually offering an imperial

crown to Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, nationalists often as-
sumed the linguistic community encompassed German speakers living
throughout and even beyond the German Confederation. 119 The
breadth of this vision, however, should not obscure the fact that most
nationalists followed the Grimm brothers in placing the geographic
heart of the nation in the Protestant north and tracing its cultural start-
ing point to the Goths and the Nordic lands. This emphasis reflects the
regional origins of the vast majority of Germanists, as well as the actual
concentration of antiquities in the north. The earliest textual artifact of
the German language was a fourth-century Gothic translation of the
Bible; runic inscriptions, archaeological remains, and early medieval
manuscripts were more abundant in Scandinavia than in more southern
parts of the continent. Confessional boundaries and alternate political
orientations toward Prussia and Austria reinforced the north-south di-
vide. Political discourse was replete with confessional language in the
first half of the nineteenth century, and Protestant nationalists feared
Catholic subservience to Rome. 12o
For students oflanguage, the most fundamental breach in the na-
tionalist movement was accentuated by the historical separation of the
Germanic languages into High and Low German groups and by the
southern dialects' affinities with Austrian vernaculars. Linguistically,
New High German evolved from dialects spoken in the south; the Low
German languages common to the north became the basis for modern
Dutch. Martin Luther's importance for the standardization of written
High German and the dominance of conventional northern pronunci-
ations in its spoken form, however, resulted in most nationalists credit-
ing the north with provenance over the national tongue. The idea that
High German was spoken with greatest perfection in the region sur-
rounding the coastal city of Hamburg does not reflect its historical
roots. Rather there was a greater disparity there between local vernac-
ulars and the standard written language. The acquisition of High Ger-
man in the north depended most heavily on its textual representation,
so distinctions in the sounds of spoken consonants were rendered more
true to linguistic form. 121 Austria's reactionary politics and Metternich's
success in halting the spread of nationalist organizations into Habsburg
territory likewise limited the opportunity for southern Germans to re-
claim the mother tongue as a historical outgrowth of the south.
Despite a tradition of conservative, Christian Germanism that

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looked to Austria to restore a quasi-feudal political order, there was,

nonetheless, a progressive southern German vision of the linguistic na-
tion that existed alongside the dominant northern perspective. Johann
Andreas Schmeller imagined a German cultural community that was
rooted in the southern states and extended into Austria. For him, this
region was united by its common ancestry. The tribe from which mod-
ern Bavarians supposedly descended had once occupied a swath of ter-
ritory that spanned the Danube River from its source as far east as Hun-
gary.122 As he wrote to Franz von Heheneider in November, 1817:
"Tyroleans, Bavarians, and Austrians are of the same flesh and blood,
as much as politics might have picked and teased at this. Language at-
tests to it, she makes a nation out of them .... Thus I dream somc-
times of the dark history of our forefathers and see them all descending
from the mountains." m Schmeller's convictions arose less from a con-
fessional identification with fellow Catholics than from the linguistic
knowledge that "two branches grew out laterally from the trunk of the
Germanic language family-one toward the north and the Scandina-
vian lands . . . , the other toward the south and the valleys of the
Alps. ,,124 He had an ambivalent relationship to Catholicism, recogniz-
ing its significance for the cultural life of Bavaria, but skeptical of its
doctrines and political uses. As a librarian in Munich, a post he received
in 1829, Schmeller catalogued vast numbers of medieval manuscripts
whose survival he attributed to the secularization of 150 Bavarian and
Swabian cloisters in 1803.125
Schmeller's Bavarian Dictionary, published in installments from
1827 to 1837, drew on linguistic evidence to reconstruct the shared
cultural history of southern Germans just as Jacob Grimm was com-
pleting histories of Germanic law and myth. Schmeller looked dcep
into the Alps for the heart of the southern German community. In
1833 he traveled to the mountains near Venice to research an isolated
people living in northern Italy who spoke a Tyrolean-Bavarian dialect,
later publishing a dictionary (1855) and several academy lectures on his
findings. 126 But like the grammar, the dictionary accepted the political
boundaries of Bavaria as the limits of its linguistic purview and specifi-
cally aimed to further the "mutual understanding and respect" of those
persons subject to the Bavarian king and constitution regardless of their
actual linguistic affiliations. 127 Language left him "little doubt as to their
tribal unity" with Austria, but Metternich's reactionary politics opened
"much patriotic dissent as to where the actual core of the tribe can be

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 URVOLIC GERMANIA

found. 128 Ludwig I, crown prince and later king of Bavaria, earned
Schmeller's political loyalties, having made him Professor of Old Ger-
man Literature and Language in 1828. The appointment was tem-
porarily suspended until 1830 while it went to the senior, but politically
suspect, Hans Ferdinand MaBmann. Bavaria's support for the Greek
War of Independence and Ludwig's own interest in the Germanic past,
already manifest in plans to build Walhalla, rendered the state relatively
receptive to the gymnastic movement. m
Dedicated to the young Ludwig, the dictionary documented cul-
tural continuity in Bavarian folk/ife from archaic times to the present.
It was, by Schmeller's account, an "essay on the language, manners,
and customs of His people" as they were revealed in spoken language
and provincial Iiterature uo To this effect it united a collection of "ex-
pressions appearing in living dialects" with those "found in older writ-
ings and documents."'~' Each definition included historical documen-
tation of the word's use and full morphological information on its
construction. 132 The entries were not sorted alphabetically by the first
letter, but according to an "etymological-alphabetical arrangement"
that followed the series of consonants that made up the stem syllable of
the word. U3 Thus, to find the word "Garten" (garden), the reader fol-
lowed the alphabetical sequence "g-r-t," giving only secondary atten-
tion to the intermediary vowels. It could be found between "Gersten"
and "Gerten."
The construction of the dictionary rendered it of primary use for
professional philologists with an interest in the historical evolution of
German linguistic forms. But Schmeller also hoped his work would
serve as "a portrait gallery of the versatile life of the folk as it is ex-
pressed in language.,,134 He planned (but ultimately neglected) to ap-
pend a thematic index of terms related, for example, to religious and
domestic customs, agriculture, or trade that would assist readers who
"think more of the things [Sachen] than of the words." 13, As is com-
mensurate with his sociological understanding of "the folk," however,
the dictionary entries do not romanticize or try to define what is au-
thentically German in Bavarian popular culture. Rather, it drew atten-
tion to the poor living conditions of less educated speakers of vernacu-
lar. Schmeller sought to correct, for example, idealized contemporary
images of rural life by offering critical commentary on the living con-
ditions of small farmers, on their treatment by landowners, and on their
daily work. 136

143
 CHAPTER 3

Jacob Grimm praised the Bavarian Dictionary for highlighting

the "living connection" language maintained to custom and tradition.
The two had since met twice in person, and Grimm's own German
Dictionary (1854) aspired to mesh language and cultural history in a
similar fashion. In a dismissive move that reflects Grimm's northern
German bias, however, he criticized the focus on the Bavarian vernac-
ular. The true national tongue, New High German, was for him a
"Protestant dialect ... whose freedom-loving nature has long since
overpowered poets and writers of the Catholic faith. ,,137 Lutheranism
was often championed in defense of princely authority; in the early
modern period its view of the state as a moral community was cited in
support bureaucratic absolutism. For the Romantics, however, Luther
symbolized a type of a patriotism based on the free pursuit of ideas and
the struggle against the spiritual tyranny of Catholicism. 13M Grimm's
crediting of Protestants with the creation of a national tongue con-
formed to his denominational upbringing while slighting the authority
of Austria and its repressive legislation.
The Reformation symbolized for Grimm a revolutionary moment
when Germans escaped the tyranny of Roman culture and recovered
lost aspects of their own prehistory. Grimm blamed Roman Christian-
ity for having destroyed early Germanic folk beliefs and endeavored, in
the German Mythology (1835), to reaeh baek to what he thought were
the "seeds" of a purer faith. "Christianity was not of the people," he re-
called, "it came from abroad and sought to displace time-honored, na-
tive gods" who were "part and parcel of the people's traditions, cus-
toms, and constitution.,,139 In their "slavish subjection to distant
Rome," missionaries had inflicted "multiple injuries on the national
consciousness. ,,140 Luther supposedly reversed much of this damage.
"Lifting the burden of the Roman ban," Grimm observed, the Refor-
mation "rendered our faith at once freer, more inward, and more in-
digenous. God is near us everywhere and He blesses each fatherland
from which fixing our gaze beyond the Alps would alienate us. ,,141 It
was inevitable, he argued, that "the Reformation happened directly in
Germany": "just like language and mythology, the inclination of a peo-
pie's faith is something that cannot be erased." 142
The migration paths of the Germanic tribes also seemed to sup-
port the northern emphasis of Grimm's conception of the linguistic
community. The ancient historian Jordanes and later Scandinavian
scholars believed the first Germanen had entered Europe from the east

144
 URVOLK GERMANIA

and north so that the earliest and richest evidence of German culture
was to be found in Scandinavia and Saxony. Gothic and Old Icelandic
were as important for Germanists as Greek and Latin were for students
of classical antiquity because, in Grimm's words, the earliest myths,
sagas, and legal texts "flow[ ed] freely in Scandinavia but sparingly in
Germany. "IH The wave of Christianization and Romanization that had
destroyed many Germanic traditions had broken from the south, leav-
ing barbarian culture intact later and in more complete form among in-
habitants of Iceland and the far north. Jacob Grimm drew extensively
on Nordic and Anglo-Saxon sources in his histories of ancient Ger-
manic mythology and law, convinced that the lands that withstood
Christianity and Roman rule the longest retained "many precious ad-
vantages in the common life of the folk." 144 His faith in the unity of
continental German and Norse mythology resided foremost in lan-
guage and the success with which contemporary German languages
had been tied in descent to a common Ursprache. 145
As a student of Danish runes, Wilhelm Grimm was more familiar
with Nordic prehistory than his brother. 146 He, too, insisted in 1820
that "the Germanic element of our Bildung ... was preserved and de-
veloped more purely and with less disruption in the isolated north ....
Nordic antiquity relates to Germanic antiquity like the languages of
people living in isolated valleys and mountains to the languages of
those living in cities." Although no runes had of date been uncovered
in Germany, Wilhelm Grimm rightly surmised the existence of German
runes based on extent literary evidence. The Germans, he argued, had
like the Norsemen "brought the first foundations of a letter alphabet
with them from the Asian homeland. ,,147 Germanic tribes such as the
Saxons living in the north near the Danish border had, in his view, used
this ancient alphabet, and one need only study their northern neigh-
bors to reconstruct an early chapter of German national history. 148
Until the emergence of the so-called Deutschkatholiken in 1844,
Catholics played only a minor role in the German nationalist move-
ment. The influence the church maintained over gymnasial and univer-
sity education outside of Prussia, where an independent ministry of
culture had been instituted in 1817, kept the study of German lan-
guage and literature centered at the Protestant universities in Berlin,
Gottingen, Halle, Jena, Breslau, and Leipzig. Even here the local focus
ofliberal and nationalist politics hampered the coordination of a "large
German" nation that included the south. Two years following the pub-

145
 CHAPTER 3

lication of the German Mythology, Jacob and Wilhelm themselves were

dismissed from their professorships in Gottingen for having protested
King Ernst August's revocation of Hannover's 1833 constitution.
Along with five of their colleagues, they were left without employment
and forced to leave the state. Not until Friedrich Wilhelm IV assumed
the throne in 1840 did the Grimms join the Royal Prussian Academy
of Sciences as full members working on the German Dictionary pro-
ject, though still lacking civil service appointments at the university.

PRUSSIA AND PAN-GERMANISM IN THE VORMARZ

Upon their arrival in Berlin, the Grimm brothers were uncertain

whether Prussia would be able to overcome its particularist ambitions
as a territorial state and give form to the nation. The pair had previously
resisted several calls to the capital, suspicious of Prussia's claims to rep-
resent German national identity. As Toews argues, however, Jacob
Grimm increasingly felt at home in the court of Friedrich Wilhelm IV,
finding a niche within the officially sanctioned ideology of post-Ro-
mantic historicism that rose to prominence in the 1840s.I 49 Grimm
demonstrated to the Prussian elite that his research into the Germanic
past could contribute to the creation of a new national public culture.
Under a regime that itself aspired to national cultural leadership, his
resurrection of a national cultural identity lost its oppositional charac-
ter. ISO This commitment to Prussia should not obscure, though, the de-
gree to which Grimm's vision of the nation resisted the confines of state
structures. Defining the linguistic community by shared historical de-
scent verged on Pan-Germanism. And especially following the failed
revolutions of 1848-49, Grimm tended to privilege bonds of ethnicity
over a conscious commitment of loyalty to the state.
Grimm's call to Berlin coincided with a substantial growth in Ger-
man nationalist institutions. A threatened French occupation of the
Rhine in 1840 renewed patriotic sentiment in the form of Heinrich
Hoffmann von Fallersleben's "Deutschlandslied" and Max Schnecken-
burger's "Wacht am Rhein." A series of national festivals and public
memorials erected to great Germans such as Gutenberg and Schiller
likewise popularized a movement once dominated by intellectuals. In
1842 alone Walhalla, Ludwig I's temple to Germanic heroes, opened
outside Munich, construction began to complete the medieval
Cologne Cathedral in neo-Gothic style, and the monument to com-
memorate Hermann's victory over the Roman legions was well under

146
 URVOLK GERMANIA

way. Not only had the idea of the "nation" expanded beyond a narrow
reading public in the 1840s, but nationalists had developed a sustain-
able network of communication that enabled coordinated political ac-
tion among the middle class.
German language scholars participated in these developments at
annual academic conferences where Germanists discussed nationalist is-
sues while avoiding the ban on suspect gatherings imposed by the Ger-
man Confederation in 1832. 151 At the inaugural meeting in Frankfurt
in 1846 Jacob Grimm served as the organization's first president. His
opening address posed the provocative question "What is a nation
[Volk]?" Grimm's response cited the spread oflanguage as the only lim-
itation on the territorial growth of a people. "A nation," Grimm
replied, "is the embodiment of people who speak the same language.
that is for us Germans the most innocent but also the proudest defini-
tion because it ... turns our gaze to the ... near future when all bar-
riers fall and the natural law will be acknowledged that neither rivers
nor mountains divide nations but that language alone can set bound-
aries around a people that has pushed past mountains and streams. ,,152
These words were a specific commentary on the two main political is-
sues facing the conference: the current crisis of succession in Holstein
and the continued emigration of large numbers of German speakers to
the United States. The presence of a German-speaking majority in that
northern province and in the neighboring Danish territory of
Schleswig suggested to Grimm that both should be part of the confed-
eration. Grimm also expected German emigrants overseas to retain ties
to the fatherland and "reinforce" their native language so that it would
"live forever forth" in the New World. 153
Besides work on the German Dictionary, the major piece of lin-
guistic scholarship that Grimm undertook in Berlin was a two-volume
History of the German Language completed in 1848 as the March rev-
olutions struck the capital city. The work wove a broader cultural nar-
rative around the linguistic events sketched in the German Grammar.
Dedicated to a fellow member of the Gottingen Seven from Frankfurt
in June 1848, it was, in Grimm's words, "political through and
through," arising out of the "duties and dangers of the fatherland. ,,154
The History publicized what he termed "the inner bonds of a people"
in expectation of overcoming the fatherland's "unjust partition by
princes."l55 In what was criticized as an overly "speculative manner,,,15'
Grimm argued for the original affinity of the languages once spoken by

147
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the ten main European tribes as they migrated westward. His main goal
was to establish, using etymology and lexical considerations, the "iden-
tity of the Goths and Getae,,,IS7 a tribe now believed to be related to
the Celts that inhabited Thrace, a province between the Balkans and
the Carpathian mountains. Grimm also argued for the probability of
more extensive contacts between the Goths and the Daci, supposed an-
cestors of the Danes. These links between north and south were, for
Grimm, evidence of original affinity among present-day speakers of
Germanic tongues. Comparativists criticized his almost complete lack
of attention to Sanskrit and other related languages, and his main the-
sis of Gothic-Getic identity ultimately failed despite the popularity of
the book. ISH
Nevertheless, Grimm successfully demonstrated how the recovery
of language could aid in reconstructing material and cultural history.
The two volumes aspired to "reach from the words to the things, "IS9
inaugurating the so-called "Wijrter-und-Sachen" approach to prehis-
tory and anthropology.160 "There is more vital evidence for nations than
bones, weapons, and graves," Grimm explained, "and that is their lan-
guages ... when all other sources run dry or the existing remains leave
us uncertain and in doubt, nothing can be more conclusive for ancient
history than careful research on the kinship or deviations of every lan-
guage and vernacular unto their finest veins or fibers.,,161 Words,
Grimm demonstrated, revealed new affInities in the "faith, law, and
customs" of the prehistoric Germanic tribes as they abandoned a no-
madic lifestyle for sedentary agriculture. 162 The History contained ma-
terial intended for a history of German custom and mores, and for lin-
guists its most valuable contribution was examining the vocabulary of
material culture as related, for example, to mctals, livestock, or grain,
in early Germanic languages. lo3
A new conception of language and its role in the formation of
communities distinguishes this account of the Germanic tongues from
the German Grammar. The greater contIdence Grimm amassed as an
insider to the Prussian project of translating the historical recovery of a
national past into official public memory lessened the autonomy
Grimm attributed to the evolution of language as an organism. As
Toews indicates, Grimm's discussion of the two Germanic sound shifts
now stressed that the historical forms of language were motivated by
more than a formative point of origin. The inner laws governing the
linguistic organism alone could not explain the sound shifts. Rather,

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 URVOL/( GERMANIA

language also had to be approached as a sign system that responded to

an external reality; grammatical structures now demonstrated that cul-
rural existence was also historical in a contingent sense. 1M Grimm be-
lieved that the rapid advance of the Germanic tribes in their westward
migration destabilized inherited linguistic forms and forced those in the
lead to adapt their language to a new reality. Significantly, the sound
shifts had only occurred among certain groups of German speakers pos-
sessing the greatest pride and ambition. loS
Despite this recognition, the political institutions of Prussia did
not seem adequate to the task of reconstituting a national linguistic
community. The historical model of Germanic unity that the Goths
provided was expansive and Pan-Germanic. Gothic, in Grimm's analy-
sis, most closely resembled proto-Germanic of all extant languages,
and he confirmed that its speakers formed the "earliest ranks of the
German nation."l66 The History, moreover, emphasized the expanse of
their dominion in early medieval Europe. The various Gothic tribes, he
noted, extended their rule over the Pyrenees into Spain, over the Alps
into Italy, south and east through Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece, and
up to the border with Byzantium. "If the strength of the Goths had re-
mained intact" he lamented, "and if their rule in the east had been se-
cured like that of the Franks in the West, then the fate of Germany and
the German language would have taken another direction. ,,167 As it
was, the second Germanic sound shift divided Gothic speakers into
High Germans, Low Germans, and Scandinavians. But readers should
not forget that "all Germanic languages, however far their branches
and boughs may have grown apart, clearly stem from the same trunk
... ; the further back one reaches, the more similar appear the Goths,
High Germans, Low Germans, and Scandinavians. All are of the same
origin.,,16H
Gothic unity in the early medieval period resembled a Pan-Ger-
manic empire that looked beyond specific political organizations to en-
compass related speakers throughout Europe. Grimm presented a new
theory of dialect change in the History that foresaw a reversal of the
Germanic dialects' tendency to drift apart. High and Low German,
Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, and Nordic all evolved, Grimm suggested, dur-
ing a period of political crisis when the Lombards, the Franks, and the
Arabs threatened the Goths. Today, however, a "vividly awakened de-
sire for a closer union" could convince the five dominant Germanic
tribes to reverse the process of fragmentation and merge their respec-

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 CHAPTER 3

tive "dialects" into a new mother tongue. "I hold a conversion of the
Dutch to High German, of the Danes to Swedish not only for likely in
the next centuries," Grimm observed, "but also for beneficial for all
Germanic peoples. ,,169 "Before many generations have passed, only
three peoples will share in the dominion of Europe: Romans, Germans,
Slavs." 170 In his correspondence with Danish and Norwegian scholars,
Grimm spoke of a "great alliance" between the German states and
Scandinavia that "recall[ ed] the primordial tribal union" with a certain
degree of political expectation. 171 Other Germanists, such as Heinrich
Hoffmann von Fallersleben, sympathized with the fate of Flemish
speakers in the newly founded kingdom of Belgium. Fallersleben's
twelve-volume study of Belgian literature (1830) responded to the pain
of observing "this land being torn away from the greater German tribe
(Volksstamm)" as French became the official state language.172
As the History of the German Language went to press, Jacob
Grimm served as a representative to the Frankfurt parliament charged
with drafting a national constitution for Germany. The delegates delib-
erated for close to a year on the most suitable form for German unifi-
cation, finally admitting that the paltry state of the nationalist move-
ment in Austria prevented the inclusion of Habsburg territory.173 Their
debates dismissed the apparent historical necessities of language and
ethnicity in favor of treating citizenship rights independently of cultural
background. 174 Like the majority of delegates, Grimm favored a small
Germany led by a hereditary Prussian emperor for practical reasons, ex-
pecting that the other Germanic peoples would gradually join the
union. Johann Andreas Schmeller likewise resigned himself to exclud-
ing Austria at this time, awaiting the spread of liberal reform to the
monarchy and wary of its imperial structure. 175 He, too, had been voted
into the professor-parliament in the Paulskirche but had been unable to
attend due to injuries incurred crossing the Jaufen mountain pass. 176
In September 1848 Grimm himself quit the assembly in protest of
the generous peace treaty Prussia had signed with Denmark. He feared
that Prussia had once again demonstrated that it valued its own inter-
ests as a state above its national responsibility to unite German-speak-
ers everywhere. l77 Friedrich Wilhelm IV's rejection of the imperial
crown and the violent suppression of the revolution by Prussian troops
in the spring of 1849 did little to dispel this view. A practical conces-
sion to small-German plans for unification was no longer necessary; po-

150
 URVOL[( GERMANIA

litical avenues of nation building were closed for a second time since
the Napoleonic invasions.
In his speech "On the Origin of Language" to the Prussian
Academy in 1851, Grimm again confirmed that language, not princes
or armies, was the driving force behind the consolidation of the German
nation. Language is "our history, our heritage," he argued. "The power
of language" "builds nations and holds them together, without such a
bond they would burst apart; the wealth of a people's thought is prin-
cipally that which secures its dominion in the world. ,,178 The essay at-
tributed an explicitly ethnic dimension to the German cultural commu-
nity, associating the successful transmission of national tongues with the
inheritance of a particular physical body. An abandoned newborn of
French or Russian parentage who was "taken in and reared in the mid-
dle of Germany" would naturally speak German like the other children
around him.17Q But "some of our German sounds," Grimm suggested,
would always "seem hard" to him. Language, Grimm explained, had an
"underlying basis which is necessarily conditioned by the created body."
The "voice instruments" that produced sound were, in his mind, "in-
herited" and particular to national groups. ISO "Already present in the
throats of children," he concluded, was "the inherent tendency towards
the expression of appropriate sound modifications." Slavs, tor example,
were conditioned to use "strong sibilant combinations" or "harsh gut-
turals." The study of anatomy, he predicted, would soon enable schol-
ars to distinguish even the "linguistic instruments" of a northern Ger-
man and an Alpine shepherd. 181
For Grimm in 1851 lines of ethnic descent qualified a child's abil-
ity to master German as a native tongue. Joining the German linguis-
tic community through a process of voluntary self-identification would
necessarily leave a mark of difference. There were clear limits to the de-
gree language as a historical form could be mobilized by free linguistic
agents in a self-determining community. For Grimm, the cultural in-
tegrity of the nation ultimately depended on the historically necessary
bonds imposed by shared descent from a common cultural starting
point. As Toews concludes, Jacob Grimm never did regard politics as a
forum where individuals could freely adapt and recreate historical iden-
tities. '82 Even as German unification under Prussian leadership became
increasingly probable in the 1860s, the perceived evolution of the Ger-
man language maintained a substantial degree of independence from
the control and direction of speakers. Deeply rooted ethnic continuities

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 CHAPTER 3

likewise appeared to withstand the contingencies of historical existence.

GERMAN PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS:

WILHELM SCHERER

Mter midcentury, research on the German language increasingly fell to

the purview of scholars trained in comparative linguistics. Jacob Grimm
had left unresolved the implications comparative grammar had for ana-
lyzing Germanic tongues. Wilhelm Scherer ( 1841-86), the star of post-
Grimm Germanics, pursued both German and cumparative Indu- Euro-
pean philology in Vienna before writing his own On the History of the
German Language in 1868. Several of Franz Bopp's students devel-
oped concentrations in Germanic tongues, including Albert Hoefer
(1812-83), professor of Comparative Linguistics and Old German
Philology in Greifswald. Ferdinand Justi, F. L. K. Weigand, and Rudolf
von Raumer likewise combined the fields; Marburg professor franz Di-
etrich specialized in Germanic and Semitic languages. Knowledge of
Sanskrit enabled this generation to study the historical evolution of
Germanic vowels, which Grimm found impossible given their consid-
erable deviation from original Indo-European forms. The cohort
emerging in the 1850s likewise endeavored to supplement Grimm's
understanding of sound change with attention to the distinction be-
tween written and oral forms. IS.'
The integration of German language study into the field of lin-
guistics initially worked to the benefit of Germanists. Comparative lin-
guists gave impetus to the secondary school reforms that in the 1860s
substantially increased the number of university chairs in German
philology. In 1857, for example, Albert Hoefer, member of the Greif-
swald committee examining candidates for German language posts at
the gymnasium level, sent an invective to the Prussian minister of cul-
ture titled "German Philology and Linguistics and Their Demands on
the Present." In his view, teachers of German could not possibly fulfill
their duties without training in "Sanskrit and comparative linguistics, in
Gothic, Old and Middle High German.,,184 Academic knowledge of the
mother tongue required both comparative and historical literacy by the
1850s. A Prussian regulation passed in 1866 set the fIrst high standards
for secondary school German teachers. In addition to familiarity with
the style and history of German literature and the ability to make aes-
thetic judgments, the teaching candidate either needed to demonstrate
"enough knowledge of the historical development of language that he

·152
 URVOLK GERMANIA

can read and interpret texts in Old and Middle High German" or have
training in philosophy. 185
The 1860s mark the consolidation of German philology as a full-
fledged university discipline. The number of chairs grew from thirteen
to twenty.lH6 Rudolf von Raumer arranged for Germanists to be ac-
cepted in 1861 as a special section of the annual meetings of classical
philologists, school masters, and Orientalists; the more rigorous train-
ing of secondary school teachers had improved the reputation of Ger-
manics in the eyes of classicists. ls7 These developments coincided with
a closer orientation of the field toward the Prussia of Otto von Bis-
marck. Wilhelm Scherer famously depicted German philology as "the
daughter of national enthusiasm," a field motivated by "love of the na-
tion."IHH The wars of German unification and the founding of a North
German Confederation made apparent that Prussia was ascending to
national leadership. As the resolution to the constitutional crisis of
1862 indicates, many German liberals were willing to sacrifice their po-
litical convictions for national unity, and so, it appears, were academics
in the field of German philology.
Born in Lower Austria to family of civil servants, Wilhelm Scherer
is a case in point. Scherer completed his secondary education in Vienna
during the period of reaction that Emperor Franz Joseph instituted
after 1848. For two years he studied German philology with Franz
Pfeiffer, as well as comparative linguistics, at the University of Vienna.
The repression of nationalism and liberalism in Austria and a conflict
with Pfeiffer over the interpretation of the Nibelungenlied, however,
brought Scherer to Berlin, where he attended Jacob Grimm's lectures
and studied text-historical methods with Karl Miillenhoff. In a debate
over the authorship of that saga, Pfeiffer meshed criticism of Prussia
with his opposition to Miillenhoff's northern German philological
school. Scherer opted to bestow his nationalist ambitions and political
loyalties on Prussia even after its crushing defeat of the Austrians in
1866. 189 Scherer launched his academic career as an assistant to Miillen-
hoft~ editing early medieval poetry and prose. But when offered a po-
sition in Vienna in 1864, he returned to his native city. During his
eight-year tenure at the university, Scherer repeatedly faced reprimand
for his support of Prussia and German national unification. 190 Although
he imagined the German nation expanding beyond state borders to in-
clude native speakers in Austria, Scherer never sympathized with the
idea of a Grofldeutschland.

153
 CHAPTER 3

Scherer's linguistic interests precede his better known work in the

history of German literature. 191 Yet, as late as 1873 he considered lan-
guage to be "the truest mark of nationality," one that enabled "deep
gazes into the thoughts and feelings ofnations."m His monograph On
the History ofthe German Language shed light on the "origin of our na-
tion ,,193 by revisiting from the perspective of phonetics the sound shifts
that produced Proto-Germanic and Old High German. Rejecting
Grimm's focus on written form, Scherer examined primarily sound
properties. He also extended Grimm's historical trajectory in both di-
rections, incorporating evidence from early Indo-European tongues, as
well as observations of speech factors in the living languages and di-
alects of his time. 194 According to Scherer, the historical evolution of
language could not be divided into a period of growth followed by de-
cline. He borrowed from geology the notion of uniformitarianism, ar-
guing that the conditions of language change remained consistent over
time; there was "only development, only history" in language. 19s
Scherer assumed linguistics to be a historical science. In his view, how-
ever, it was closely related to the natural sciences because processes ob-
served in the present could be projected onto the past as an explana-
tion for historical change. The scientific method best identified regular
features in the uniform development of language. 1"6
Evoking images from Prussia's wars of unification, Scherer as-
serted that similar power relations governed the "life of language" and
"the life of nations and states." Roots behaved like "independent his-
torical powers." Some "expanded their territory" and achieved "exten-
sive sovereignty," while others "went under." The History appeared
two years after Prussia's 1866 victory over Austria, which enabled King
Wilhelm I to consolidate his control over the north German states. For
Scherer, the process of German unification was visible in language as
well. Certain words rose to the top, in a way resembling "power
changes on the ... world historical scene." Specifkally, Scherer argued
that the "two reoccurring processes" of "transference" and "differenti-
ation" explained the declining number of roots in Germanic languages
and the increase in composita, or words that expressed meaning by
adding prepositions. One verb expanded to cover the meanings of
other roots, forcing their disappearance; the meaning of old roots was
transferred to the victors, which then added prepositions to differenti-
ate among the various meanings they represented. 197

154
 URVOLK GERMANIA

Theories of sound physiology and acoustics, taken from Viennese

physiologist Ernst Briicke, helped Scherer explain the "causality,,'9" be-
hind the sound shifts that Grimm had observed. He assumed that uni-
form tendencies in the workings of German linguistic muscles and or-
gans across time had distinguished the language spoken by the earliest
members of the nation; physiological laws at work in contemporary
Bavarian dialects, for example, could be used to explain why the Ger-
u
man vowels £ and evolved into ai and au. 199 Three processes "easing
the formation of consonants" had produced the first sound shift and
separated Proto-Germanic (germanische Grundsprache) from Indo-Eu-
ropean. Physiologically, this entailed, for example, "a mere contraction
of the vocal cords rather than a complete closing of the glottis in voice-
stop consonants." Scherer speculated that the fine "hearing of our Ger-
manic forefathers" had allowed them to transform "sonorous Aryan
stops into whispered voice-stop consonants. ,,200 The second sound shift
distinguishing Old High German involved select tribes "preserving the
original power" and increasing the relative importance of the secondary
accent in root syllables or the "low tone." Speakers of Nordic languages
and Low German emphasized the main accent of roots words "at the
expense of the low tone. ,,201
A deep psychological fusion of inborn German bellicosity and the
spirit of Roman antiquity provided the broader context for the linguis-
tic changes that produced High German, and thus the nation. Accord-
ing to Scherer the particularly lively intonation in Old German pronun-
ciation derived from Germans being "filled with an all-powerful desire"
and an "active potency" that expressed itself in an eternal love for war.
War, he argued, had been the "greatest desire" and the "ideal of Ger-
man existence." This aristocratic trait was "most deep and lasting," and
Scherer wondered what possibilities it might bring for the future. 202 At
the same time, "direct and lasting contact" with Roman antiquity had
also shaped the second sound shift. An early separation of future Ger-
mans from the mass of migrating peoples and their rapid forward ad-
vance exposed them to the sounds of Latin poetry. Scherer concluded
that the uniqueness of the German language had also been wrought by
the "transformation in the spirit of our nation that the conditions of so-
cial life after the occupation of Germany" had instilled. m As Franz
Greg notes, Scherer and his generation of Germanists still honored
ncohumanist cultural ideals and did not accept what Scherer denigrated
as "the narrow concept of mere blood relations. ,,204

155
 CHAPTER 3

The implications of this are varied. Did Germans have to fear that
cultural contact with speakers of Romance languages might once again
fracture the nation? Was war with France necessary to guarantee Ger-
man unity? Either way, Scherer assumed the existence of an essential,
deeply rooted German "psychology,,205 that acted in concert with phys-
iological mechanisms to produce the language that united the nation.
The national tongue, in turn, shaped the mentality and outward cul-
tural forms that drew together speakers of German. Historical contin-
gencies had only a slight impact on the regular and consistent laws gov-
erning the inner life of language. As holds true for earlier Germanists,
Scherer attributed a powerful explanatory potential to the interpreta-
tion of origins. Deciphering an act of emergence allowed the linguist to
pinpoint a national essence and trace its continued impact on genera-
tions of German speakers.
The linguists who came to prominence in Germany in the 1870s
owed a substantial debt to Scherer. According to Hermann Paul,
Scherer taught the Neogrammarians (Neugrammatiker) the impor-
tance of sound physiology, the exceptionless nature of linguistic laws,
and how to explain sound change based on the principle of false anal-
ogy. Four of the founding members, including Paul, specialized in Ger-
manic tongues and likewise credited Scherer with revealing the impor-
tance of Old High German in determining Proto-Germanic forms.
However, the Neogrammarians also dealt Scherer devastating blows
for lacking a sound empirical basis and for his hastily drawn conclu-
sions. 206 Scherer's search for a deep psychological explanation for lan-
guage change ran counter to their more stringent form of positivism.
Scherer was quickly discarded as a mentor and his linguistic studies ta-
pered off by the later 1870s. The center of German language study had
shifted away from the discipline of German philology.
In 1872, following the Franco-Prussian war, Scherer himself ea-
gerly accepted a chair at the new imperial university in the recently oc-
cupied Alsatian city of Strassburg. His self-proclaimed mission was to
invest local students with a sense of their German cultural inheritance
and thus earn their loyalty for the new Kaiserreich. Scherer's expecta-
tions far exceeded the reality of nation building, however. Shunned by
the Alsatians, the German professors remained isolated among them-
selves, finding their only contact with soldiers. 207 Scherer remained in
the post at the personal request of Bismarck until 1877, when he rc-

156
 URVOLK GERMANIA

joined his former colleagues in Berlin as the first chair in the History of
German Literature.
After the Reichsgriindung, the field of Germanics increasingly
served the ideological needs ofthe new nation-state, having lost the lib-
eral and oppositional overtones of the Restoration and Vormiirz peri-
ods. A conservative nationalism infused the institutionalization of uni-
versity seminars in Germanics after 1871, as well as German instruction
at the secondary schools. 208 The Kaiserreich pursued a conscious policy
of promoting the field, as German language, literature, and history oc-
cupied a central place in its national-cultural agenda. Comparative lin-
guistics profited, as well, by virtue of its association with the history of
the German language, gaining both prestige and an expansion in aca-
demic chairs. 20o Not until the 1890s, however, could Germanics truly
compete with classical studies as a Brotwissenschaft or bread-and-butter
discipline. 2lO Kaiser Wilhelm II declared to a conference of school re-
formers in December 1890 that "Our school system lacks at present,
above all, its national basis. We must take German for the foundation
of our gymnasia. We want to educate our pupils into young Germans,
not young Greeks or Romans. ,,211 For most of the nineteenth century,
scholars of Greek and Latin held sway over the German cultural imag-
ination, even as a comparative and historical approach to language
stuck a thorn in their idealization of classical antiquity.

157
 4
Urbild Hellas
~anguage. Classical PhiiologU. and the Ancient Greeks.
1806-66

I n 1807 the director of the prestigious philological seminar at the U ni-

versity of Halle asserted the cultural value of classical studies by den-
igrating the "barbarians" of antiquity. Friedrich August Wolf
(1759-1824), who with C. G. Heyne had helped found the new disci-
pline in the 1780s, argued in his Classical Scholarship: A Survey
(Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft) that the Egyptians, Hebrews,
Persians, and "other nations of the Orient" should not be studied along
with the Greeks and Romans. His distinction between cultures was not
based on patterns of historical contact, but on aesthetic and moral
judgments. Only the Greeks had reached that level of "civic stability
[Policirung] or civilization" capable of fostering "a truly higher intel-
lectual culture." Like Friedrich Schiller in his "Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Man" (1794), Wolf idealized the ancient Greeks as a uni-
versal model for cultural development. No antique people before the
Hellenes had attained such a "high spiritual or literary culture," nor
had another nation yet matched the originality of the organic Greek
cultural synthesis. Hellenic antiquity embodied "the cultivation of pure
humanity" for Wolf, and he hoped the modern Germans would soon
emulate its ideal.'
The Oriental Renaissance questioned such assumptions. In 1808
the comparativist Friedrich Schlegel made a plea for recognizing the

159
 CHAPTER 4

importance of Indian antiquity. "May the study of India," he wished,

"find a few settlers and patrons like those who ... extol[ ed] the study
of Greece in Italy and Germany during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies." Schlegel believed that the "poetic beauty and philosophical
depth" ofIndian epics rivaled the cultural and intellectual achievements
of the Greeks. India, too, promised to "change and rejuvenate" the Eu-
ropean world. 2 Schlegel assured his readers that the "art, philosophy,
and poetry of the Greeks" would remain "very much a necessary prepa-
ration ... for profound erudition." But just as Latin had clarified the
transmission of ancient Greek traditions to the Germanic Middle Ages,
knowledge of Sanskrit would now "illuminate yet entirely unknown
areas of earliest antiquity. ",
Classicists initially regarded comparative philology with disdain,
and the friction between the fields is not hard to fathom. Schlegel pre-
dicted that the cultural significance of Oriental studies would eclipse
that of classical philology. He also identified India's source of the lever-
age over classical antiquity-its presumed originality. If the Hellenic
past had to be interpreted with reference to earlier Eastern traditions,
then the Mediterranean could no longer be considered the au-
tonomous cradle of European civilization. Comparative philologists,
for their part, dismissed the old guard, declining to defer to their
knowledge of language and the example of Hellenic antiquity. "Classi-
cal philology, the old leader of the dance, has been truly outflanked,"
the comparativist August Friedrich Pott sneered in 1833, "May it col-
lapse upon itself; the minuets are out of fashion ... a science that wor-
ships two or three peoples like idols and scorns the others as barbarians
or wild men. ,,4
Disputes over language lay at the heart of the comparativist-clas-
sicist divide. At stake was provenance over language study and its role
in the historical appreciation of antiquity. Until the rise of comparative-
historical philology, students of Greek and Latin held a virtual
monopoly over general linguistics and the study of grammar and ety-
mology. The linguistic structures of Greek and Latin were presumed,
moreover, to mirror in exemplary fashion universal laws oflogic and ra-
tionality. Yet students of Greek gradually lost their authority as lin-
guists. The transformation of Altphilologie into Altertumswissenschaft
undermined the philosophical justification for venerating the pure
forms of Greek grammar. Classicists began to approach Greek and
Latin texts as one of antiquity's many cultural artifacts and a contextu-

160
 URBILD HELLAS

ally specific object of historical criticism. Comparative philologists cre-

ated linguistic genealogies that illuminated the earliest points in a na-
tion's history. This practice was of little use to classicists who wished to
assert the normative value of the Greek language and culture and to de-
fend the autonomy of Hellas's Golden Age.
This chapter investigates how comparative-historical philology al-
tered the way classical scholars approached language, as well as the im-
pact it had on the neohumanist German veneration of ancient Greece.
It shows that classicists were initially reluctant to embrace the new tech-
niques of their colleagues because a comparative perspective questioned
the prevailing view that classical Hellas was the Urbild or the primor-
dial, ideal model of cultural development and nationhood that modern
Germans should emulate. Ancient Greek had once rivaled Hebrew as
the possible Ursprache or divine language of revelation. Some classicists
still believed that the graceful style and structures of Greek most accu-
rately represented the material world; others considered its presumed
universality and transparency evidence that Greek was the medium best
equipped to express metaphysical truth. The presumed proximity be-
tween ancient Greek and the modern German language hlrther ap-
pealed to German speakers who styled themselves as the most adept in-
terpreters and custodians of the Hellenic legacy, having been, they
claimed, the only Europeans to have escaped the imprint of Latin.
Comparative philology encouraged classicists to inquire into the
origins and broader historical context of the Greek ideal. Perhaps not
the timeless embodiment of universal human values, ancient Greece
had to be reconceived within a view of world history that derived all
things from the East. Was Hellas merely derivative of Indian or Egyp-
tian traditions? Was the national affinity that appeared to bind modern
Germans to ancient Greeks less compelling in light of new theories of
Indo- European descent? Classicists eventually adapted to a comparative
perspective, linking Greece to the story of the Indo-European language
family in a manner similar to Germanists. Bracketing the question oful-
timate origins, they defended the autonomy, integrity, and universal
cultural significance of the ancient Greek language, as well as the liter-
ature, mythology, art forms, and philosophy of its speakers.
The chapter opens by considering the role of philosophical gram-
mar within the aesthetic idealization of Greece, detailing the emergence
of a specifically national identification with the Hellenes after the
Napoleonic invasions of 1806. It follows the progressive historicization

161
 CHAPTER 4

of the Hellenic ideal under the leadership of Wolf's most prominent

student, the Berlin classicist August Boeckh (1785-1867). Material
philologists (Sachphilologen) or "realists," such as Boeckh, diminished
the importance oflanguage study within the German reception ofHel-
lenic antiquity, reducing words to one of many historical expressions of
the Greek spirit. Boeckh and his students also reconsidered the norma-
tive value of Hellenic antiquity, opening discussion of the likely origins
of Greek culture. Comparativists challenged classicists to situate ancient
Greece within a larger genealogy of human development that began in
the East. The Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Turks
and its political implications for Germany inspired them, in turn, to
"de-Orientalize" Greece. The philhellenist Friedrich Thiersch (1784-
1860) expected modern Germans, as the current representatives of the
Hellenic spirit, to return Greek independence and learning to classical
soil after centuries of Turkish occupation. Karl Otfried MUller
(1797-1840) and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784-1868) likewise
defended the cultural autonomy of ancient Greece against Orientalists
who insisted on deriving European culture trom a common Asian
homeland. By midcentury, however, these scholars and figures such as
Georg Curti us (1820-85) had learned to appropriate tenants from
comparative-historical philology itself to argue for the cultural signifi-
cance of ancient Greece to Germany.

PHILOSOPHICAL GRAMMAR AND THE HELLENIC IDEAL

The normative authority Hdknic antiquity wielded over German cul-

ture rested, as F. A. Wolf stipulated, on a moral and aesthetic vision. As
a pedagogical alternative to the utilitarian rationalism of the Enlighten-
ment and the Latin learning of the church, German neohumanism
promised to cultivate the inner life of the self-realizing, moral subject.
The philological seminars of G. F. Heyne in Gottingen and F. A. Wolf
in Halle venerated Hellas less as an actual historical achievement than as
a model of personal wholeness, social responsibility, and natural free-
dom. The self-reflective and interpretive practices required of classical
scholarship aided the self-cultivation of ethical individuals and rewarded
achievement and merit over the precedence of birth. 5 The specialized
research ethos of the discipline and the esoteric knowledge produced by
professional classicists often contradicted the ideal of resurrecting moral
freedom through aesthetic integrity." But tor early classicists the forms
of Greek culture expressed a pure humanity that offered a holistic anti-

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dote to the fragmentation of an overspecialized modern world. The

prestige of the educated bourgeoisie in Germany depended on the aca-
demic professions, and classical philology was the choice discipline for
ambitious members of the Protestant middle class. The type of Bildung
imparted through contemplation of the Greek language and literature
allowed graduates of philological seminars to claim for themselves a dis-
interested, universal, and public vision of cultivation that extended be-
yond the narrow interests of traditional forms of privilege.?
For this reason, classical studies tended to attract moderate liberal
nationalists and Protestants, such as the Bonn philologist Friedrich
Gottlieb Welcker, brother of the liberal activist Theodor. Classicists as-
sumed that ability and education warranted an expansion of political
representation to their ranks-male members of the upper middle class.
Welcker, for example, was fired from his post in Gidkn in 1816 for
publishing an article, "On the Constitution of the Estates and Ger-
many's Future," that demanded a national constitution. His repeated
struggles to gain and retain employment despite being one of Ger-
many's foremost classicists are one extreme case of the republican pil-
lars informing Hellenism. The classical polis exemplified an ideal of
civic and intellectual freedom that supported middle-class constitution-
alism." Most classical philologists, however, came to enjoy a closer part-
nership with the state than the more radically politicized and opposi-
tional Germanists.
Language helped resurrect the Hellenic past in several ways. On
the one hand, Wolf regarded ancient Greek as an "instrument" or
"tool" that "acquainted" the philologist with "historical things. ,,9 Texts
were the primary window on the past, and critical interpretation and
exegesis required solid grammatical knowledge. Wolf listed grammar
and language studies as the first pillar of philology; mastery of Greek
and Latin was necessary before attempting hermeneutics, political his-
tory, or the study of mythology. On the other hand, his Classical Schol-
arship: A Survey presumed language to be "a large storehouse of ideas
. . . that a Volk has."!O Wolf followed Herder in claiming the native
tongue to be "the measure of a nation's culture."!! Language repre-
sented the spirit of the Hellenes "as well as morals and customs." It
therefore comprised part of the totality that classicists investigated.
"Does one learn language to explore the history and fate of ancient na-
tions, or just as language?" Wolf debated. "What is the means, what are
the ends?,,!2 Students of material culture largely adopted the first per-

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spective, seeing in language a practical vehicle for research. Grammari-

ans held to the second.
The neohumanist veneration of Hellas relied, moreover, on the
profoundly ahistorical perspective of general grammar. As rhetoricians
serving theological and law faculties, philologists had traditionally re-
garded language aesthetically. Greek and Latin supposedly offered ideal
cognitive models for expressing ideas with precision and elegance. Wolf
assumed words were "signs" tor communicating ideas, as well as for
"making one aware of his own thoughts and recalling them. ,,13 His vi-
sion of classical studies likewise maintained an intrinsic connection be-
tween ancient languages and the ideal forms of thought. "Philosophical
or general grammar" was the first and most important discipline that
had to be mastered before learning Greek and Latin. Students needed
familiarity with "the general principles and rules upon which human
languages are built. ,,14 For Wolf knowledge of universal rules facilitated
language acquisition, even among school children. 15 Grammar, more
importantly, had philosophical import. Similar to logic, it made appar-
ent the universal "laws of human thought."'" "Because human language
is designed in the same way as thought," he explained in 1810, "the
general rules that bind all languages can be derived very easily from the
nature of the human spirit." Each tongue emerged "analogically" to the
rational structures that governed the universe; their diversity was caused
by "anomaly" or an inevitable process of mistaken deviation from the
norm.'7 Studying the Greek language thus offered Wolf "a means to
perfect our concepts and clarifY thought." He assumed ancient Greek
to be "an excellently designed language" with inherent intellectual ad-
vantages. 'x
The most prominent Greek grammarians of the early nineteenth
century upheld a rationalist approach to language. "Verbalists," classi-
cal scholars who made the text, including questions of grammar, meter,
and style, the main object of their analysis, tended to idealize the cog-
nitive advantages of Greek. Gottfried Hermann (1772-1848), profes-
sor of eloquence and poetry in Leipzig, headed the grammatical and
critical school of the classicists. Born the son of a prominent German
lawyer in Leipzig and a French mother, Hermann received his degrees
from the university in his native city. In 1794 he briefly studied Kantian
philosophy in Jena.'9 His mentor, K. 1. Reinhold, argued that the uni-
versal categories of the understanding could he found mirrored in lan-
guage. Hermann, who lectured on logic and Kant's Critique of Judg-

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 URBILD HELLAS

ment upon returning to Leipzig, himself advocated a rationalist ap-

proach to grammar. His De emendanda ratione Graecae Grammaticae
( 1801) derived Greek structures and forms systematically and logically
rather than reconstructing them from historical evidence. Language,
Hermann insisted, was a ret1ection of the human mind. He sought to
identifY the strict laws governing thought while honoring the free ex-
pression of artistry made possible by rhetoric. 20 Accordingly, Hermann's
textual criticism proceeded "prophetically." He sought to perfect places
where literary works appeared corrupt or dissolute, correcting what the
author "meant" to say based on his knowledge of rhythm and poetic
form.21
Several tensions characterize the nineteenth-century German re-
ception of antiquity, including a contradictory vision of Greece as a his-
torically particular, yet universally human culture. Latent nationalist
rhetoric also pervaded the German appreciation of ancient European
languages despite Hermann's universalizing assumptions. The idealiza-
tion of Greece was often couched in nationalist terms that gave Ger-
man classicists sole provenance over the legacy of the Greeks. In his
History of Ancient Art (1764), for example, the art historian Johann
Joachim Winckelmann upheld the sublime aesthetic embodied in the
statues of Periclean Athens as an antidote to the baroque, aristocratic
tastes and values of the old regime. In his view, Greek art embodied
man's true, uncorrupted nature freed from the artificial social distinc-
tions of the court and the overspecialized modern world. Of all national
styles it referred least to the historical context of its production and was
most likely to draw agreement on its being beautiful. 22 Winckelmann's
preference for Greece was, at the same time, an overt criticism of the
extent to which French classicism celebrated imperial Rome, in partic-
ular of the parallels Charles Perrault drew between the reign of Augus-
tus and the absolutist siecle of Louis Xrv. 23
The years of the Napoleonic occupation increased the emphasis
classicists placed on the national attributes of classical antiquity. Ac-
cording to Manfred Fuhrmann, the eighteenth-century querelle over
the respective virtues of the ancients and moderns was reformulated in
this period into a new comparison of the national characteristics of the
Greeks, the Germans, and the Romance countries of Europe. 24 The
French regime equated its political might with that of imperial Rome;
Germans identified with the vanquished Greeks of the second century
Be. Although politically fragmented and subject to a foreign power,

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they could rely on cultural and spiritual ties to sustain the nation. Dur-
ing the Wars of Liberation publicists exploited the neohumanist affin-
ity for Greece, depicting German resistance as an effort to escape from
the political tyranny of Roman culture. In occupied Germany, where
the national spirit was believed to have taken refuge in cultural and ed-
ucational institutions, the philological seminars of such universities as
Berlin readily assumed patriotic tones. 2S A highly politicized program of
neohumanist pedagogical reform that began in Prussia and gradually
spread to the other German states likewise made public the nationalist
reception of Greek antiquity.
The Prussian statesman and educational reformer Wilhelm von
Humboldt, likewise a student of C. G. Heyne, exemplifies the transi-
tion of neohumanism from an antiaristocratic, eighteenth-century
movement to a moderately nationalist state-sponsored program. For a
brief period between February 1809 and July 1810 Humboldt served
as the head of newly created Sektion fur Kultus und Unterricht of the
Prussian Interior Ministry. As part of the wide-ranging series of reforms
begun by Karl von Hardenberg and Karl Freiherr vom Stein, he estab-
lished classical studies as the backbone of German education. Hum-
boldt restricted university admissions to graduates of classical schools
or gymnasia who had passed the Abitur, an exam requiring extensive
translations of Greek texts, as well as testing in Latin. Humboldt like-
wise designed the model university of Berlin, the first working and re-
search university in Germany, around F. A. Wolf's philological seminar.
This institutionalized the cultural leadership of classical philologists in
the universities and secondary schools, affirming the importance of
neohumanism to the state and public sphere. 26 Philological seminars
became the training grounds for future bureaucrats in the expanding
administration of the territorial states, as well as for ecclesiastics in the
Lutheran state churches. 27
For Humboldt, Hellenic antiquity offered foremost a Bil-
dungsideal that could be applied to the cultivation of the self. As he ex-
plained in "Latium and Hellas: Observations on Classical Antiquity,"
an essay written in 1806 while Humboldt was serving as the Prussian
ambassador to the Holy See in Rome, the pedagogical value of Greek
antiquity lay in its embodying the ideal in all aspects of human life.
Only the Hellenes "allude[d] to the ideal in everything" and demon-
strated in art, poetry, religion, morality, and public life how one can
achieve a "bridge from the individual to the ideal. ,,28 Humboldt's neo-

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 URBILD HELLAS

humanist reforms were founded on the principle that studying Greek

language and literature provided students with the best insight into the
ideal of human development, civic responsibility, and moral freedom
that the Greeks exemplified. 29 Immersion in the Greek past supposedly
liberated the individual from regulated society and emancipated one
spiritually from the one-sidedness and compartmentalization of the
modern world. Humboldt aspired to create loyal, self-willed, and ethi-
cal citizens who honored merit and achievement over birth as criteria
for social advance. 3o
Humboldt idealized ancient Greece in largely ahistorical terms
and tended to value the cosmopolitan world citizen over the patriot.
The origins of "Greekness," he conceded, were "difficult to determine
historically, and the causes that contributed to its development ... pri-
marily internal." One could not easily specity why humanity evolved to
such perfection in ancient Greece: "It was because it was.,,31 His essay
significantly omitted all reference to ancient Rome and neglected to
draw an explicit connection between the German national character
and the ability to resurrect the Greek ideal. Rather, in a brief compari-
son of the ancient Hellenes and "most cultivated nations after them,"
Humboldt proposed that the main strains of the Greek character had
been split and jointly inherited by the French and Germans. The affin-
ity of both nations to the Greeks was, in his view, "only incomplete";
their respective virtues were "almost equally far removed from the
Greek." Humboldt only hinted that Germans approached something
that is "closer to the meaning of the Greek. ,,32 He revered Greece as the
foundation for building an individual, ethical, and civic ideal that stood
above national loyalties and did not rely on a specifically German inher-
itance of the classical past.
The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire brought Humboldt back
to Prussia to care for his family estates in Tegel near Berlin. German de-
teat to the French likewise inspired him to depict the Greek-German
connection in more assertively nationalist terms that insisted on the
special historical ties between modern Germans and the Hellenes.
Humboldt's History ofthe Fall of the Free Greek States (1807) thus com-
pared the political fate of occupied Germany with that of the Greek
city-states under the Roman Empire. Germany, in his view, displayed
"in language, in the versatility of its endeavors, in the simplicity of its
temper, in its tederalist constitution, and in its most recent fate, an un-
deniable similarity with Greece." The northern fatherland, he hoped,

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would likewise survive by virtue of its cultural strength. Humboldt now

emphasized German speakers' exclusive ability to emulate the ideal
forms of Greek culture, grounding this claim in the linguistic affinities
that existed between the two tongues. "The Germans deserve the un-
contested merit," he explained, "of being the first to comprehend
Greek Bildung truthfully and to have felt it deeply ... other nations
have never been as fortuitous in this."" Because the Romance countries
of Europe had adopted so much Latin into their native languages, their
direct connection to the ancient Greeks had been broken.
The nationalization of Hellenic antiquity altered the perceived
significance of language studies. Classicists had once justified their
monopoly on teaching rhetoric, grammar, and syntax by asserting that
fluency in Latin and Greek had inherent intellectual merits. In the early
nineteenth century the circle of classicists surrounding the gymnasial
reformer Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766-1848) in Bavaria
and the other main representative of south-German neohumanism,
Friedrich Jacobs, demonstrated the national importance of studying an-
cient Greek, while still drawing on older theories of general grammar.
Friedrich Ast (1778-1841) and Franz Passow (1786-1833) embraced
Hellenic antiquity as the foundation of a specifically German national
Bildung during a period of political crisis. Greece for them was an "em-
blem of national virtue,,,·H a paragon of strength and cultural authen-
ticity that would transform schoolchildren into patriotic Germans.
The special affinity these classicists felt for Hellas relied on a vision
of ancient Greek as the oldest and most perfected language. Johann
Arnold Kanne (1773-1824) had already pointed out the lexical similar-
ities between Greek and German roots, speculating in 1804 that the
two tribes might once have lived together in northern Europe or that
modern Germans were the direct descendents of the ancient Greeks ..lS
Friedrich Ast, who had joined the Bavarian university of Landshut in
1805, explored the significance of this connection more thoroughly in
his essay On the Spirit of Antiquity and Its Meaning for Our Age
(1805). Ast had studied speculative philosophy with the Jena Roman-
tics J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel, and he con-
sidered language "to be the most original and true revelation of the
human spirit, the Ur-poetry of a people.,,36 Greek, according to Ast,
was "the prototype [ Urbild] of all languages," the primordial ancestor
to which all European languages traced their roots but also the univer-
sal "ideal of language generally. ".'1 There was, moreover, a historical

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 URBILD RELLAS

basis for "the un mistaken kinship of Germanic and Greek." As Ro-

mance languages, the other European tongues had been "mediated
first through the Latin language. ,,38
The historical ties Ast extended from Greek to German were not
genealogical in the way that Friedrich Schlegel linked his mother
tongue to Sanskrit. Ast tended to conflate historical distance by equat-
ing in dialectical fashion the present day with an idealized moment in
the Greek past. The Hellenes, in his view, had coalesced as a "harmo-
nious living state" in which each individual faithfully encapsulated the
spirit of the whole. 39 His teleology of world history attributed to the
ancient Greeks a youthful stage of humanity, one blessed with vitality
and beauty, but unselfconscious and unaware of its significance for the
development of culture. Modern Germans were philosophically more
attuned to the historical progress of the human spirit, but they also suf-
fered from this inwardness. When one compared the "public and na-
tional life" of the ancients, Ast feared, Germans appeared as "barbar-
ians against the Greeks." Ast hoped they would model their public life
on classical antiquity, thus completing the spiraled development of cul-
ture that began in Greece. 40
An instructor at the Conradinium in Jenkau bei Danzig, Franz
Passow had more concrete, pedagogical expectations for the study of
ancient Greek. "The Importance of the Greek Language in Educating
German Youth" (1812) was one of two articles he published in the
1812 Archive for German National Education) delineating the benefits
that familiarity with Greek grammar had for strengthening the German
national consciousness. The journal, of which he was coeditor, had so-
licited contributions discussing curriculum for a "national school" in
Germany. Studying ancient Greek was for Passow "a national [goal],,41
because it helped the younger generation "achieve higher Bildung and
nationality. ,,42 He acknowledged the need for instruction in the mother
tongue, "the noble, vigorous, rich, patriotic language" that the aristoc-
racy had banished "with criminal indiscretion." But Greek was an essen-
tial first foundation. It was "most analogous to the German language"
and due to its "innermost affinity" with German could best clarifY the
grammatical principles and root meanings of words in the mother
tongue. Greek was also "the most perfect, the nearest reflection of the
ideal,,43-an indication of the "general cultural state of a nation.,,44
Wilhelm von Humboldt envisioned an even broader role for lan-
guage study. His essay "Latium and Hellas" made a case for a textually

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based historical appreciation of classical antiquity by characterizing lan-

guage as a reflection of an external reality, but one that was molded by
the idealizing impulses of the Greek mind. The word, in Humboldt's
analysis, was both a "picture of the thing" that it describes and an in-
dication of how the external world was "thought with reason or imag-
ined with fantasy. ,,45 Thus, by studying language, "an expedient be-
tween fact and idea," classicists could decipher how ideal Greek cultural
forms had evolved from within the imperfect, historical world. Accord-
ing to Humboldt, language also revealed the Greek national character.
Geography, climate, religion, and the polity were, in his mind, more or
less coincidental to the formation of the spirit of the nation ( Volksgeist).
Language, by contrast, "not only offers a means for comparing several
nations but also a handy mark for tracking the influence of one nation
on another. ,,46 Classical philologists ultimately declined to follow Hum-
boldt's suggestion that the study of linguistic structures themselves, as
opposed to the textual meaning embodied in them, could help negoti-
ate between the ideal and historical aspects of Hellenic antiquity. And
Humboldt himself slowly gravitated to the comparativist camp, eventu-
ally favoring Sanskrit over Greek after meeting Franz Bopp in I -andon
in the early 1820s.
Not surprisingly, classicists shunned the new methods of compar-
ative philology long after they had set the scientific standard for lan-
guage study in other fields. Gottfried Hermann and his students Chris-
tian A. Lobeck (1781-1860) and Karl Wilhelm Kruger (1796-1871),
reacted with cool indifference, suspicion, and even open hostility to the
newcomers' attempts to interpret the classicallanguages. 47 In the Acta
Societatis Graecae of 1830, Hermann mocked those who "without mas-
tery or refined reading, hoped that light would come from the regions
where the sun rises, while only contemplating the aurora borealis. They
... try to explain the meaning found in vestiges of Greek and Latin
verbs without sufficient knowledge of the languages.,,48 Jacob Grimm
had shown comparative-historical linguistics to be useful for research
on individual languages in 1819, but with a few exceptions classicists
preferred to retain older principles of grammatical criticism in their
treatment of Greek and Latin. This reaction was partly an effort to pro-
tect the status of classical studies as the model philological discipline; its
representatives feared a leveling of the institutional distinctions still
maintained between the fields!" But the obstinacy of classicists was also
a response to the uncertainty and experimental nature of comparative-

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 URBILD HELLAS

historical linguistics, whose practitioners often displayed severe deficits

in their knowledge of individual languages. 50 The necessity of produc-
ing Greek and Latin school grammars likewise encouraged classicists to
seek strict and simplified rules with which to codify these tongues,
rather than to explore otherwise revealing deviations from the norm. 51
Not until the mid-1830s did the first Greek grammars using the
comparative method begin to appear, such as that by Theodor Benfey
(1834) or Georg Curtius (1852). Others followed that examined Greek
roots and particles or sketched brief histories of the Greek language. 52
Their treatment of Greek phonology and morphology was so rudimen-
tary, however, that as late as 1869 the comparativist Theodor Benfey
(1809-81) described as the "doubtlessly most glaring gap in Indo-Ger-
manic linguistics" that there was still no satisfactory comprehensive
grammar of Greek. 53 Classicists generally did not encourage a genealog-
ical approach to the ancient European tongues and studied neither
modern Greek nor such dialects as Doric, Aeolic, and Ionic, preferring
to focus on the standardized Attic language of the late fifth century
BC. 54 Even New Testament or Koine Greek (Common Greek), the ver-
nacular dialect spoken in the first-century Roman provinces of the east-
ern Mediterranean, had received, according to Benfey, "very unsatisfac-
tory" attention. 55 The apparent ambivalence of classicists led one
perturbed comparativist to assert in 1841 that his colleagues had
achieved more for language studies in the past twenty years than all the
classicists leading up to Gottfried Hermann in the previous two hun-
dred. 56

HISTORICIZING THE GREEK IDEAL: AUGUST BOECKH

Nationalist rhetoric often elided the historical distance separating an-

cient Greeks and modern Germans by emphasizing their elective affini-
ties. Friedrich Ast, for example, placed little importance on the histor-
ical specificity of thought or action; in his view, the classicist needed to
be a philosopher and aesthete so that he could establish the identity be-
tween the timeless spirit of ancients and moderns. 57 Classicists did not
emphasize problems of genealogy and origins as did Germanists or
Orientalists. Rather, two definitions of antiquity permeated classical
studies: one that idealized Hellas as a literary, artistic, pedagogical, and
ethical norm, and one that subjected the Greek past to more rigorous
historical scrutiny. Nevertheless, when considering how classicists in-
terpreted language, it is insufficient to claim that historicism made "lit-

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 CHAPTER 4

tie headway" against normative claims to Greece's aesthetic superior-

ity58 or that aestheticism remained the "dominant strain"S9 in the Ger-
man reception of Greek antiquity in the years after the Wars of Liber-
ation.
An increasingly historical approach to Hellas is visible in the way
classicists such as August Boeckh regarded language. Born in Karl-
sruhe, the capital city of Baden, Boeckh studied with F. A. Wolf in
Halle before, at the young age of twenty-five, he assumed leadership of
the philological seminar at the newly founded university in Berlin. In
1814 he was elected member of the Academy of Sciences, serving for
many years as its secretary. Boeckh's own work exemplifies the tension
in classical studies between humanism and historicism. Boeckh sug-
gested that the Greek past was "particularly worth knowing."oo Its ped-
agogical value lay in ancient Greece's offering a model of individuality6!
and teaching "true political freedom and the lasting principles of the
same.,,02 A moderate liberal, Boeckh compared the Greco-Persian wars
to the German struggle against Napoleonic France, for example, and
often related Berlin to Athens. o3 Nevertheless, he set aside considera-
tions of general linguistics and largely limited the study of language to
analyzing syntax, word-formation, and meter, techniques that aided
classicists in textual criticism.'" Boeckh's break with the tradition of ra-
tionalist grammar helped unravel the largely ahistorical adoration of
Hellas that dominated the field in the 1810s. Rather than merely up-
hold the Greek past as a normative ideal, Boeckh introduced a new ap-
proach to classical philology that raised questions about the origins of
Hellenic culture.
Boeckh's efforts to historicize classical antiquity unfolded in his
posthumously published Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philologi-
cal Sciences) a series of lectures first held in Heidelberg in 1809 and re-
peated twenty-six times before Boeckh's retirement in 1865. Classical
philolugy, in his view, took as its domain "the entire historical manifes-
tation" of Greek and to a lesser degree Roman antiquity.05 More than
any other of his students, Boeckh carried out Wolf's encyclopedic pro-
gram for Altertumswissmschaft by including previously untouched
areas of Hellenic life within the scope of philological study. He divided
classical antiquity into four main spheres of activity: the state, private
life, art and religion, and science or knowledge ( Wissen). Boechk's own
work covered such topics as the financial system of Athenians, mining
in antiquity, and weights and measures. 66

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 URBILD HELLAS

The task of the philologist was, in Boeckh's well-known formula-

tion, to gain "knowledge of what the human spirit has produced, that
is, knowledge of what was produced by other minds,,,67 and then
through analysis and translation to reconstruct the "totality of this
knowledge." For this reason, Boeckh believed his definition of philol-
ogy fell "together with that of history in the broadest sense." Philology
as a discipline was "purely historical," and history also had to proceed
"philologically" because it drew on written sources. Boeckh held the
only difference between the two fields to be one of scope. History con-
centrated on political life, while philology considered "the rest of cul-
tural life in connection with the state.',68 He preferred the designation
"classical philology" over Wolf's term, "classical studies." The study of
Greek and Roman antiquity was for Boeckh only one area of the larger
historical field of philology, which included textually based research on
anyepoc h .69
The critical techniques developed within classical philology (and
later adopted by the Roman historian B. G. Niehbuhr) helped establish
the tradition of idealist historiography in Germany; through his student
J. G. Oroysen, August Boeckh played a key transitional role in the
emergence of German historicism. 70 Historical phenomena were, in his
view, concrete manifestations of eternal ideas that needed the interpre-
tive tools of philosophy to be comprehended in full. Philology, Boeckh
explained in the Encyclopedia and Methodology) "proceeds historically,
not from concepts; but ... philology cannot reproduce the totality of
a people's knowledge without working philosophically on this con-
struction.,,71 The act of interpretation transpired, in Boeckh's view, as
an ever-building spiral driven by the tension between the formal and
material elements of antiquity. The particular in the historical life of the
Greeks only had meaning when it was "conceived within a whole" and
related to "the idea of antiquity in itself." Boeckh stressed that this gen-
eral principle was "admittedly only an ideal that can never be fully
reached because it is impossible to unite all the individualities under a
totalizing perspective. ,,72 This hesitation to complete the hermeneutical
circle marks Boeckh's distance from the speculative philology of
Friedrich Ast who thought classicists capable of smoothly resolving the
relationship between the general and particular. 73
Boeckh's redefinition of classical philology encountered resistance
within the discipline, not least from the ranks of the "verbalists" or
Wortphilologen. Under the leadership of the aging Leipzig classicist

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Gottfried Hermann, these scholars sought to preserve an exclusive

focus on the study of language and literature and thereby to uphold the
normative status of Hellenic antiquity. Classical philology as practiced
by Boeckh's most vocal critic was restricted to the art of understand-
ing, interpreting, and reproducing a literary tradition that was held to
be exemplary. Boeckh expanded the program of classicists to encom-
pass all cultural phenomena and their function in relation to the cul-
tural and social system of antiquity.7.
In 1819 a debate over the direction the field of classical philology
should take gathered force following a critique Hermann published of
Boeckh's work on metric theory in Pin dar. At stake were the implica-
tions of historicizing Greek antiquity and the importance of language
study within the German reception of classical antiquity. The antago-
nisms escalated in the years after the 1825 publication of the first vol-
ume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, a substantial collection of
Greek inscriptions undertaken by Prussian Academy of Sciences at
Boeckh's request shortly after he was made a member. Until 1835 most
classical philologists felt compelled to state their position in the quar-
rel, although it was often not a case of taking one side or another but
of assessing the benefits and disadvantages of each position. Ultimately,
the realists who focused on "things" instead of words prevailed, but the
tenacity of Hermann's vision suggests the extent to which scholars still
looked to the Greek language as an ideal of self-cultivation.
At the heart of the controversy lay "two very diflerent concep-
tions" oflanguage, which Gottfried Hermann clarified in 1826. Work-
ing within the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, Hermann be-
lieved that language was a reflection of the human mind. He objected
to Boeckh's assumption that the ancient tongues were "merely a
medium and do not need to be the object of knowledge. ,,7> For Her-
mann, language was the "most important and excellent thing [Sache]"
of classical antiquity. On the one hand, the mother tongue of ancient
Greeks was "in itself ... the vital image of their spirit" because "it best
characterized their essence or being. ,,76 On the other hand, he held lan-
guage to be "first and most indispensable because only through it can
everything else be understood. ,,77 Hermann insisted on the priority of
words even when studying the "things" of antiquity. Thorough knowl-
edge of language was already knowledge of the material world, in his
view; the philologist could grasp the essence of archaic objects by
studying their representation in language. Texts, moreover, best illus-

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 URBILD HELLAS

trated the ideal nature of the Greek past. Hermann still had faith that
the eternal qualities of the rational mind were expressed in the timeless
classicism of ancient Greek literature.
In an 1827 article published in the Rheinisches Museum, Boeckh
affirmed that language was important to understanding the ancient
Greeks but challenged the significance the senior scholar attributed to
the pursuit of grammar. Philology, he suggested, was not a generalized
study of human reason but a scientific, historical examination of the
"life and work" of "a particular people during a relatively restricted pe-
riod." As a form of thought, language should be considered one of the
"things" of antiquity comparable with religion, political life, or house-
hold practices. It, too, gave insight into the national character of the
Greeks, but, in his view, should not be privileged above other aspects
of ancient life. Language was most important for Boeckh as the "means
to recognize almost all the other creations of antiquity." Precise knowl-
edge of Greek was essential to researching other areas of classical life,
but he insisted that philology present the facts and ideas of antiquity
based on "the monuments of language, but without getting stuck on
the interpretation of language itself. ,,78
Linguistics proper was condemned to an ancillary role within
Boeckh's model of classical philology. The field, Boeckh insisted, was
not "identical with the study of language. ,,79 The Encyclopedia and
Methodology treated language as part of a larger section on science and
knowledge, giving a brief history of ancient Greek following other his-
torical sketches of geography, political life, religion, art, and literature.
He described language as "the general organon of knowledge," while
rejecting the rationalism of Hermann. The Greek national tongue was
"the pure expression of all understanding, not only of reason. "so There-
fore philology must explore its forms as part of a larger historical appre-
ciation of classical antiquity. Boeckh deemed it impossible to compose
a universal grammar. Ancient Greek had to be presented "in its devel-
opment through time and space"SI in order to complement a greater
cultural complex. At the same time, Boeckh rejected the proposition
that language determined the content of cognition. The Greeks, in fact,
were the first to establish "dominion over the natural side of lan-
guage, ,,82 regulating variations in sound and abstracting words whose
t1rst meanings were bound to concrete, material artifacts. Language ex-
isted for Boeckh as a "system of signs that change according to the
ideas signified. ,,8.' It was merely an instrument for larger cultural artic-

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ulations and thus no more than an artifact of Greek historical life.

The one midcentury classicist to make linguistics central to his re-
search on antiquity, while denying the normative claims of rationalists
like Hermann, worked outside of Germany. Johan Nicolai Madvig
(1804-86), an internationally renowned Danish Latinist, introduced
Wolfian-style Altertumswissenschaft to Denmark. He likewise resem-
bled other classicists of the period in that he rejected the emphasis
Bopp, Grimm, Humboldt, and Pott placed on linguistic genealogy.
Philology, in his view, was a historical science designed to replicate
great currents in the development of ancient civilization. Language
study, in the form of hermeneutics and textual criticism, was an essen-
tial tool of historical inquiry. Madvig's Encyclopedia of Philology, com-
piled from the lecture notes of students at the University of Copen-
hagen, argued that general linguistics should be the foundation for
Greek and Latin studies. But grammar had a significance of its own that
could not be derived from the rational structures of thought.
The language theory Madvig outlined in academy speeches and
essays published in the 1830s and 1840s represents an interesting tran-
sitional phase between general grammar and the structuralist theories
developed by Meilleit, Brtal, and Ferdinand de Saussure in the late
nineteenth century."' Like earlier Enlightenment figures, Madvig
viewed language primarily as a practical means of communication that
emerged within a specific social and cultural context. Signs were arbi-
trary and conventional; the meaning of words depended on the agree-
ment of the community and the continuous sanction of its members.
Reconstructing how a society attributed meaning to signs would assist
the classical philologist in drawing together the many cultural manifes-
tations of antiquity into a unified whole. Madvig advocated a syn-
chronic, structural approach to Greek and Latin that focused on prob-
lems of syntax and signification, rather than phonology and
morphology.
Madvig's reconciliation of classical philology and linguistics found
little support on the continent. A rationalist approach to language had
failed among the German classicists who historicized the idealized vi-
sion of Hellas passed down by Wolf and Hermann. Their reception of
antiquity relegated language to one among many cultural artifacts,
while acknowledging the methodological necessity of skilled textual
criticism. Classicists likely avoided linguistic theory because the search
for pure and original forms dominated it so heavily in Germany. And a

176
 URBlLD HELLAS

genealogical appreciation of Greek and Latin threatened to embed Hel-

las within cultural traditions that originated in a more ancient East.

(DE-)ORIENTALIZING GREECE: FRIEDRICH THIERSCH

In the 1820s German classicists, nevertheless, inquired into the histor-

ical origins of ancient Greek culture, a sensitive topic first broached in
The Histories of Herodotus and debated throughout the eighteenth
century.85 The Munich classicist Friedrich Thiersch and several of
Boeckh's students asked how and why "Greekness" arose at the time it
did. Their findings confirmed that the classical Greek aesthetic of the
fifth-century BC was neither timeless nor had it graced Greek soil since
time immemorial. Rather, Hellenic culture appeared to derive from
precisely those Middle Eastern and Asian sources that Wolf had dis-
missed as insignificant. The Romantic mythologist Friedrich Creuzer
( 1771-1858) hdped raise these issues. His Symbolism and Mythology of
the Ancient Peoples, Especially of the Greeks (1810-12) linked Greek re-
ligious symbolism to an Asian homeland and sparked a heated dispute
with such classicists as Hermann, Lobeck, and K. o. Miiller.86 The
Greek War of Liberation, which began in 1821, also raised new con-
cerns by highlighting Greece's liminal status between Europe and the
Ottoman Empire; it set Greece at the center of debates around national
self-determination and liberal political reform as well. At a time when
the restoration of monarchical authority troubled many classicists and
German university professors, a despotic "Orient" loomed over the
perceived cradle of European civilization.
Deriving Greek culture from Asia had for Friedrich Creuzer been
a conservative statement compatible with reactionary politics. As
George Williamson argues, his assault on the humanist image of ancient
Greece and his emphasis on the "oriental" heritage of Christianity un-
dercut a Protestant ideal of "freedom" in favor of Catholic "author-
ity. "H7 A decade later, Thiersch modified this position to support a lib-
eral political agenda, albeit one that appealed to the Bavarian court. As
a phil hellenist, Thiersch campaigned to drive the Turks from the Pelo-
ponnesian peninsula and "return" classical learning to its rightful
homeland. He conceded the Egyptian and "Oriental" roots of Greek
culture, but insisted on the uniquely Hellenic ability to elevate inher-
ited wisdom to ideal forms. This disgruntled classicists, such as K. o.
Miiller, who insisted on the local authenticity of Hellenic culture and
on Greece's independence from Eastern influences.

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Born the son of a baker and small Protestant landholder in

Thuringia, the young Thiersch earned a scholarship to the prestigious
Schulpforta boarding school where he received a classical education.
He began studying theology in Leipzig with Gottfried Hermann. The
degree Thiersch took in philology came from the University of Gottin-
gen, where he met August Boeckh. An unusual set of circumstances
brought Thiersch to Munich as a professor at the local gymnasium in
1809. Princess Caroline of Baden, second wife of the then Elector
Maximilian IV of Bavaria, was a Protestant. Her influence convinced
Maximilian to solicit Protestant scholars to the Bavarian Academy of
Sciences, including F. I. Niethammer, who procured Thiersch's post.
The classicist enjoyed close ties to the House ofWitteisbach, first as the
tutor of Caroline's four daughters, then as advisor to Crown Prince
Ludwig, a philhellene in his own right. Mter ascending to the throne,
Ludwig charged Thiersch with restructuring Bavaria's schools on the
humanistic model; in 1829, he passed a bill requiring classical lan-
guages for gymnasium students, just as Wilhelm von Humboldt had
done for Prussia. B"
During the French occupation, Thiersch initially encountered
considerable opposition in Bavaria as a liberal nationalist from northern
Germany. Catholic supporters of Napoleon, including Baron Johann
Christoph von Aretin, hoped the French armies would secure a victory
for the Roman church over Protestantism. Von Aretin's sympathizers
declared Bavarians to be Celtic, not German and, as such, natural part-
ners of the Gauls; Napoleon from this perspective stood poised to res-
urrect a Bavarian-Celtic kingdom. In 1809 von Aretin published a
pamphlet targeting German nationalists, including Thiersch, Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi, and Anselm Feuerbach. At stake in the quarrel was
also his defense of Enlightenment educational ideals over and against
Romantic neohumanism. 89 Thiersch responded with a pamphlet on the
differences between northern and southern Germans and with a ser-
mon at the Protestant court chapel. On the last night of Carnival in
1811, an attempt was made on his life. Thiersch survived the stab
wound to his neck. The assailant was never caught, but Thiersch
blamed his Catholic opponents.
Thiersch's On the Periodization of the Fine Arts among the Greeks,
first published in 1826 but presented earlier as a series of three academy
lectures, addressed the problem of Greek origins. The piece took issue
with the art historical interpretation of Greek sculpture J. J. Winckel-

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 URBILD HELLAS

mann had outlined in On the History ofAncient Art (1764). According

to Thiersch, Winckelmann was mistaken in believing that Greek art was
"independent of foreign influence, having sprouted from native soil,,90
and wrong in seeking its origins "in Greece alone.,,91 Thiersch likewise
objected to how his predecessor periodized the developmental stages of
Greek art, denying that Greek sculpture had consistently and rapidly
evolved "from its first origins in progressive development to its great-
est blossoming.,,92 Previous scholars had dated the beginnings of Greek
art too late, Thiersch asserted, "so that they could hide the fact that it
had progressed for over one thousand years without achieving suc-
cess. ,,9. Rather than document the idealized forms of Greek art as they
materialized in Periclean Athens, Thiersch chose to focus on a less spec-
tacular early period of Greek culture whose value lay primarily in ex-
plaining the historical circumstances that enabled the subsequent rise of
more magnificent forms.
Thiersch's argument was simple. He held that the Greek islands
and peninsula had once been a tabula rasa; the Pelasgians and other
peoples who had inhabited the area before the Greek-speaking migra-
tions were without "images of the gods even without those works out
of which art first strove to develop." Rather, they symbolized their
nameless and undifferentiated divinities with a "raw stone. ,,94 Thiersch
did not venture to assert where the original homeland of Greek-speak-
ing population lay, maintaining only that art had been introduced to
Greece at the time its inhabitants began to build cities. Following
Herodotus, Thiersch argued that the Greek religious cult came from
Egypt, concluding that the first sculptures on Greek soil had been at-
tempts to depict these new gods. 95 Thiersch acknowledged the likely
cultural contributions of all the peoples bordering on Greek waters, in-
cluding the Thracians, Phoenicians, and Libyans. But he honored
Egypt "if not as the actual mother, than as the oldest and most effica-
cious guardian of ancient Greek art.,,96 Under the impression that the
gods did not want their images to be changed, the Greeks based their
aesthetic sensibilities on Egyptian traditions until almost a century be-
fore the dawn of the golden age, displaying little individual freedom
and complacently relying on fixed types.
This legacy was less disturbing for Thiersch than the Turkish yoke
the Ottoman Empire had since inflicted on the modern descendents of
the Hellenes. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the Greek-speak-
ing peninsula and islands had been subject to Turkish rule, and many

179
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early nineteenth-century observers feared that the Balkan peninsula had

been irretrievably "Orientalized. ,,97 Historians have interpreted central
European involvement into the failing Ottoman Empire as a form of
"surrogate" imperialism. 98 Austria, in particular, has been labeled a
colonial power due to the history of its incursions into the region. 99 An-
other German state, the Kingdom of Bavaria, likewise tied its dynastic
ambitions to establishing a presence on Ottoman soil. Johannes Irm-
scher's suggestion that "Bavarian expansion to the south" (Drang nach
dem Siiden) is comparable to the Prussian "expansion to the east"
(Drang nach dem Osten) overestimates the magnitude and duration of
Bavaria's involvement in Greece. IOO But following the Greek War of In-
dependence, the House of Witte Is bach rukd over the new state. Dur-
ing the three decades leading up to the expulsion of the German
regime from Athens in 1862, Bavaria acted as a colonizing power in
one part of the "Orient," inviting settlers and attempting to resurrect
the glory of the ancients with the assistance of its most noted classical
philologist.
Friedrich Thiersch's interest in the fate of the modern Greeks
dates to a trip to Vienna in 1814 where he met the future Greek pres-
ident, Ioannis Kapodistiras, who solicited the classicist's support in ef-
forts to free the Greek homeland. Thiersch joined the Philomusen
Herarie, a society founded in Athens and dedicated to the preservation
of antiquities and the establishment of new schools, a library, and a na-
tional museum in Greece. He later opened an Athenaeum in his Mu-
nich home that, under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences, pre-
pared young Greeks to study at German universities and enabled them
to attend the lyceum where Thiersch directed the philological seminar.
When news of Alexander Ypsilanti's revolt against the Turks reached
Germany in 1821, Thiersch published the first series of numerous ar-
ticles in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, predicting the immanent
spiritual rebirth of Greece and pleading for European intervention on
behalf of the revolutionaries. lOl
The universities in the 1820s were a center of German philhel-
lenism, a movement that supported Greek independence in a thinly
veiled critique of Metternich's conservative policies. As Christoph
Hauser has documented for the southwest, where phil hellenic societies
were most active, the Greek cause offered liberal nationalists the oppor-
tunity to assert their right to political participation. 102 By 1822 the re-
alities of war had dampened the initial enthusiasm of the approximately

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 URBILD HELLAS

three hundred German military recruits sent to Greece. The idealistic

philhellenic vision collapsed not least from the fact that unlike German
liberals who envisioned the restoration of Hellenic culture and the an-
cient political system, Greek nationalists aspired to the so-called Megali
Idea of Greece: the restoration of the Byzantine Empire with an east-
ern capital at Constantinople. 103
Bavaria's King Maximillian I initially joined the other European
royal houses in condemning the revolution's assault on the monarchi-
cal principle. Thiersch attempted to solicit state support for the Greek
cause as the private tutor of the royal children and an advisor to the
crown prince's architect Leo von Klenze. Thiersch was forced to pub-
licly retract his plan for building a Greek-German army, however, and
to refrain from further phil hellenic activity until October 1825. In this
year Ludwig I assumed the Bavarian throne. The rapid Egyptian con-
quest of Athens and Missolunghi, where the English Romantic poet
Lord Byron lost his life, also convinced the major European powers to
reverse their policy of nonintervention. Ludwig himself donated signif-
icant sums of money to the Greek cause and sent officers from his army
to fight in Greece. The London Protocol of 1830 established Greece's
independence from the Ottoman Empire and offered the Greek throne
to a neutral party that would maintain the European balance of power.
Ravarian Prince Leopold von Koburg rejected the title when offered to
him. On Thiersch's urging, however, Ludwig accepted the Greek
throne for his second son, Otto von Wittelsbach.
Bavarian aspirations in Greece were largely dynastic. Ludwig en-
visioned his kingdom emerging as a great European power by break-
ing the confines of a German Mittelstaat and expanding through
Greece across the Aegean Sea. 104 The massive Bavarian investment in
postwar Greece, which threatened to bankrupt the state and forced
Ludwig's abdication in 1848, also stemmed from Ludwig's personal
infatuation with Hellas as a cultural model for the kingdom on the Isar.
Ludwig declared he would not rest "until Munich looks like Athens,"
and his placement of his son at the heart of Hellenic antiquity was in-
tended to solidify the spiritual union between Bavaria and the ancient
Greeks. His official court architect, Leo von Klenze, who designed
classical monuments around the Konigsplatz in Munich, restored the
classical appearance of the Greek capital Athens and halted military use
of the Acropolis. 105
In August 1831 Thiersch himself traveled to Greece on behalf of

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the publisher Cotta, nominally to build a network of correspondents

and to procure art treasures for Ludwig's Glyptothek. Financing the
voyage himself through the sale of a ring, he hoped to explore the
major cities of Greek antiquity but was quickly embroiled in the polit-
ical turmoil that ensued following Kapodistrias's execution in 183l.
The two-volume work he published upon his return, The Current State
of Greece and the Means to Achieve Its Restoration) argued that contin-
ued Bavarian rule was necessary to reacquaint the Greeks with classical
traditions and to sustain the geopolitical significance of Greece as a Eu-
ropean outpost bordering the Ottoman Empire. In Thiersch's view,
Ottoman rule had Orientalized the modern Greeks. He drew a disturb-
ing portrait of "the state of dejection,,106 in which the moderns lan-
guished, suffering from habits of corruption and intrigue. Yet Thiersch
claimed to find linguistic evidence that the Greek people had main-
tained the core of the Hellenic character despite centuries of Turkish
domination. JIl ?
Returning the traditions of classical antiquity to Greece, as they
had been preserved by German neohumanists, was for Thiersch the
only way to ensure Greece "enter[ ed] into the large family of civilized
Europe. "lOX His report suggested to fellow classicists "the measures to
take to restore to Greek soil letters, sciences, and the arts that had their
origins there long ago and there attained their perfection. "J09 He pro-
posed, for example, creating elementary "Hellenic" schools, neohu-
manist gymnasia, and an Otto University in Athens based on the Ger-
man model, as well as a national academy of science. "The sacred land
of antiquity," he proclaimed, has been "called once again to be the cra-
dle of a civilization." "Having left the Orient and matured under Hel-
lenic skies and having passed through the nations of the north," classi-
cal civilization is "returning in this moment to the banks of the Ilisse,
to spread out over the shores of Asia, of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt,
who assisted in its birth. ,,110 For Thiersch Greek learning had originated
in the Middle East, flowered in classical Hellas, taken a detour into
Germany, from whence it would now return to its cultural starting
point. Following the revolution of 1843, which imposed a national
constitution on the monarchy, the Bavarians lost all significant political
influence within Greece. Two years after Thiersch's death in 1860 Otto
and Amalia were driven back to Bavaria after uprisings in several Greek
cities. Classicists, however, had shown that like Orientalists working for

182
The philhellenist Friedrich Thiersch shortly after his second excursion to
Greece under the Bavarian King Otto I in 1852.
 CHAPTER 4

the Russian Empire in central Asia, their scholarship on antiquity could

have imperial implications.

THE PROBLEM OF GREEK ORIGINS: K. O. MULLER

Karl Otfried Muller, chair of classical philology at the University of

G6ttingen, also defended the cultural autonomy of the Hellenes, but
he did so by reclaiming their historical specificity within the larger fam-
ily of Indo- European peoples. Muller's conception of the early Greek
past, as well as his understanding of language, reflect the influence of
comparative philology. Muller was one of the first to integrate insights
from the field into classical studies. He accepted Europe's Asian ori-
gins. As a student of August Boeckh, the young Muller once sympa-
thized with the Romantic approach Creuzer took toward mythology.
But Muller ultimately defended the autonomy of Greek religion in a
way that reflects his moderate liberal nationalism. He preserved the
idea of Greek independence, refusing to admit that the Greeks could
have succumbed to Egyptian authority in what George Williamson de-
scribes as an anticolonial impetus. III Muller's accommodation of com-
parativism and classicism helped diffuse the nagging threat of Oriental
studies, while encouraging comparativists to maintain a special regard
for the unique forms of the Greek language.
Muller accepted Winckelmann's proposal that Greek art and
mythology were local creations, but offered an alternative interpretation
of why the Greeks had successfully maintained their cultural indepen-
dence. In his view, the magnificence of Hellenic culture was not a re-
sponse to the unique natural surroundings in which artists worked.
Rather, it expressed the superiority and strength of the Greek national
character. Muller first broached the topic of Greek prehistory in a re-
view ofThiersch's academy lectures but constructed an ever more com-
plex defense of the cultural autonomy of the Hellenes in the wake of the
so-called Creuzer affair of the early 1820s. Friedrich Creuzer had used
Egypt as an intermediary point of contact when deriving all things
Greek from India. Friedrich Schlegel, too, had suggested in 1806 that
the kingdom of Egypt was founded as an Indian colony, a line of argu-
ment pursued, though not undisputed, through the 1830s.11 1 Rather
than dismiss comparative- historical philology, as most classicists had
done, Karl Otfried Muller made use of the new Indo- European ge-
nealogies that excluded Semitic languages and also Egyptian from the
family to which Greek speakers belonged. He argued for Greece's au-

184
 URBILD HELLAS

tonomy within a model of northern Indo- European descent and evoked

new historical narratives to sustain the German-Greek connection.
"On the Presumed Egyptian Origin of Greek Art" (1820) took
Friedrich Thiersch to task, countering that Egypt was neither the
source of Greek art nor an earlier stage of it, as Winckelmann had be-
lieved. Muller's argument that each culture had evolved independently
was based on the supposition that visual art was determined "by nation-
ality" and belonged "essentially to the nation [ Volk]." Scholars, he cau-
tioned' should be wary of assuming that any given tradition was "im-
planted from abroad" unless they could prove that the nation in
question had been conquered, subdued, or "spiritually deadened" by
another. ll3 In his view, Egyptian art had been caught "forever in an in-
voluntary striving to imitate nature"; their sacred buildings followed
the basic form of the mountain. By contrast, "inner laws of order and
accordance" had guided Doric architecture, which achieved harmony
and stark, majestic beauty. I 14 Muller concluded that the strength of the
Greek national character and the superiority of Greek artistic forms
would have prevented African traditions from taking root on the other
side of the Mediterranean despite extensive contact with Egypt. ll :; "In
cvery higher spiritual activity," he wrote, "the feeble and cowardly
Egyptians lagged far behind the youthful Hellenic Volk, just as a noble
race always triumphs over the ignoble one.,,116
Central to Muller's argument for Greek cultural autonomy was a
distinction among the three main Greek-speaking tribes of antiquity.
The Dorians, inhabitants of the southern and eastern Peloponnesian
peninsula loyal to the city of Sparta, represented for Muller the true
core of Hellenic antiquity. He admired the tribe inordinately, a reflec-
tion, Josine Blok has argued, of his Protestant and conservative ide-
als. ll ? This dialect group was honored in antiquity for its discipline, so-
briety, and military qualities, and Muller gave the Dorians an
unmistakable Prussian flavor: Dorian architecture aspired to "harmony
and stark beauty"; the Dorian character opposed "everything immod-
erate, irregular, erratic.,,118 Much different, in his view, were the Ioni-
ans who lived on the west coast of Asia minor bordering the Aegean sea
and had been subject periodically to Persian rule. This tribe lacked na-
tional integrity. Their "restless longing for the outer world and lively
interest in everything foreign" was tor Muller reflected in lax morality
and a luxurious way of life. Ties to Persia had softened and feminized
thcse Greeks so that Ionian architecture displayed less majesty and

185
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more grace. Instead of "manly strength" the Ionians idealized "female

daintiness," instead of "quiet simplicity, colorful diversity."ll9
Orchomenos and the Minyans (1821), the first volume of Muller's
History and Antiquities of the Doric Race expanded his crusade against
the derivation of Greek culture from the East. The book denounced
comparative mythologists such as Crcuzer and Josef Garres who
turned "their eyes perpetually and only to Egypt, Phoenicia, and the
most distant Orient." Muller regarded with suspicion their attempts
"to drive the Hellenic as much as possible out of Hellenic ways and tie
them via tangled webs of mythical ideas to ancient Indian wisdom or to
the turbid and dismal religions of the Near East and Egypt. ,,120 His ar-
gument that these traditions were based "in separate particularities and
authentic truths each for itself" 121 focused on the Minyans, who once
controlled significant parts of Boetia from the city of Ochomenos.
What Martin Bernal calls the "ancient model" of Greek prehistory stip-
ulated that Greek culture arose after Egyptians and Phoenicians colo-
nized the northern Mediterranean circa 1500 Be. Following the Greek
historian Herodotus, nineteenth-century scholars such as August
Boeckh held that the Minyans had originally enjoyed close relations
with Egypt. Muller sought to debunk this view by questioning those
Greek myths that supported the theory of the Egyptian and Phoenician
colonization of Boetia.
In volume two of his history titled The Dorians(1824), Muller of-
fered an alternative account of Greek origins that omitted all reference
to Asia. The Dorians, he maintained, should be considered the heart of
the Greek nation; their history and no other provided the best insight
into the earliest attestable traces of Hellenic culture. Moreover, the
homeland of the Doric tribe, Muller argued, lay in northern Europe in
"regions in the North where the Greek nation borders on very diverse
and widely diffused barbarian tribes. ,,122 In his view, the mountain range
stretching from Olympus to the Acroceraunian peaks in the West di-
vided the Greeks from the neighboring Illyrians, who spoke a different
language and had other customs. It was impossible, Muller believed, to
discover from whence Greek speakers had moved into this region; there
was not the "faintest glimmer of a tradition" that could tie them to
Asia.123 Historical evidence revealed, however, that the Dorians mi-
grated south around the first millennium BC, conquering ever greater
sections of what was to become Greece. The Greek nation thus existed
for Muller as far back as philologists could legitimately track its prehis-

186
 URBILD HELLAS

tory, and it had greater affinities with northern Europe than Mrica and
the East. The Doric dialect, for example, appeared to him to have a
"northern character," one similar to German. l24
Muller's account of Greek origins fit easily into Orientalist narra-
tives of westward cultural transmission. Like Jacob Grimm, he solicited
comparative-historical philology to assert the autonomy of one group
of supposed Indo-European descendents, claiming the Greek nation
proper, like the first Germans, emerged as an independent entity after
reaching Europe. During the mid-1820s, Muller took a greater inter-
est in language as an indication of nationality and cultural descent, a
new focus that is apparent in a second review Muller published criticiz-
ing Thiersch in 1826. 125 Here Muller identified language, not religion
or art, as the most originary expression of Greek national culture. "As
long as you cannot show us an Egyptian or Phoenician Homer," he
cautioned the "Oriental party," "from which the Greek Homer learned
and borrowed ... the artistry of his plan, the grace of his narrative, and
the sense for beauty in his treatment oflanguage, all of your derivations
of Greek culture from the Orient remain unproductive-you see
mosquitoes and swallow elephants." Centuries before the Greeks had
expressed themselves so eloquently in the visual arts, they had shown
their mastery "over the material of language," a "miracle" that cannot
be explained, Muller believed, "by any kind of Oriental influences and
initiatives. ,,126
The reviews of Greek grammars that Muller published in the
1830s reveal an exceptional fluency in comparative-historical philology
that reflects his close friendship with the Grimm brothers, who moved
to Gbttingen in 1829. 127 Himself familiar with Sanskrit, Hebrew, and
Arabic, Muller rebuked Greek grammarians for not applying the new
philology to classical tongues in an 1836 review of Gottfried Her-
mann's Acta Societatis Graecae. "The original state of most roots, many
derivative forms, and almost all inflections [can] only be . . . deter-
mined . . . by comparative linguistics," he advised his colleagues. 12B
Classical philology had no choice but to honor the new linguistic prin-
ciples: "Philology [must] either give in completely to a historical un-
derstanding of the development of language, of etymological research
on the shape of roots and the organism of grammatical forms or trust
in comparative linguistics as a guide and advisor in these areas. ,,129
Mliller did not, as Martin Bernal has suggested, express reservations
about etymology as a tool for interpreting Greek myths. 130 Rather, he

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only questioned that type of "speculative etymologizing"131 that was

not based in the new strict rules of linguistic correspondence and
change that Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm identified.
A rapprochement between classicists and comparativists is evi-
denced in Muller's concluding his review of Hermann with the remark
that languages were "the most eloquent witnesses for the spiritual life
of nations" when treated comparatively and historically. Religion he
now only held to be "the second product of the spirit of these peoples,"
followed in declining importance by their political life, literature, fine
arts, and sciences.!.12 "Common to all languages of a family" such as
Indo- European, he postulated, was "a primordial image, a feeling ...
for the meaning of the sounds present in the minds of the peoples dur-
ing the period in which the language developed." But this was less sig-
nificant than the differences separating the related languages of a fam-
ily. "The original diversity of the physical and spiritual condition of
nations modifies," he explained, "the realization of the language-idea."
Ancient Greek may have derived from Sanskrit, but like German it as-
sumed particular forms once it broke away from the primordial
mother. 133
While welcoming Indo-European narratives of descent, Muller
continued to assert the normative superiority of Greek culture. The
History of Greek Literature (1841), which appeared one year after
Muller's death from sunstroke at an excavation in Delphi, declared that
any "impartial linguist" would recognize the Indo-European language
family as the "most accomplished." "In this richness of grammatical
forms and in the fine nuances of thought connected with it," he as-
serted, "[lies] an ability to observe and a capacity for judgment ... that
we take as irrefutable proof of the correctness and delicacy of the ways
these people think. "m This status was confirmed by the great territo-
rial expansion of the family and by its having the most members of any
language group. A higher aptitude for culture and for developing lan-
guage," he concluded, "[was] in prehistory closely tied to greater phys-
ical and spiritual energy, in short to all the characteristics upon which
finer enrichments and the growth of peoples ... depend. ,,135
Greek stood out against all other Indo-European languages for
Muller. It had preserved its grammatical richness from Homer until the
emergence of the Attic dialect and did not suffer from the general de-
generation of grammatical forms. Sanskrit could take pride in certain
consonant combinations lacking in Greek, which, he added, "it was al-

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 URBILD HELLAS

most impossible for a European mouth ... to pronounce and mimic."

Yet Sanskrit was plagued by the frequent repetition of the short "a"
vowel, which "tires our ear to the greatest degree." The use of short
vowels in Greek was more pleasing, Muller felt, especially considering
how harmoniously they were interspersed with consonants. He consid-
ered Egyptian to be related to Semitic languages; its reliance on "exter-
nal sequences" distanced the tongue "even further form the inner, or-
ganic richness of Greek. ,,136
What were the implications for Germany? Scattered throughout
Muller's work are infrequent but significant references to the affinity
between modern Germans and the ancient Greeks. He noted that both
nations were composed of different tribes loosely affiliated by language,
customs, and physical attributes. Even before the various Greek tribes
were united in a state or under a common name, they had existed as a
cultural nation, just as, Muller added, the Goths, Saxons, and Franks
had done. 137 Their respective languages displayed a northern character
and were distinguished among other Indo-European tongues by more
autonomous development. In places, Muller also compared the influ-
ence Rome had on the Germanic tribes with what the Egyptians had
over Greece. In both cases, two peoples of opposing character bor-
dered on each other and cultural exchange between them only ensued
in the wake of military conquest. A strong national character was able
to develop only as long as the purity of the local culture was main-
tained. "Did not that part of the Germanic people, which kept itself
pure and isolated," Muller asked, "always show the most spiritual ver-
satility and force in the treatment of foreign cultural material?,,138 The
European peoples had been strong enough to resist foreign cultural in-
fluences. Modern Germans, it followed, should cease searching for a
primordial homeland in the East and direct their attention instead to
the true cradle of European civilization.
When applying the broader perspective of comparative philology
to his field of specialty, K. O. Miiller evaded the problem of ultimate
origins. No reliable connection linked the Dorians to a primordial
Asian homeland, thus the likelihood of Asian descent did not threaten
the cultural autonomy of the Greeks. Rather, reference to the Indo-Eu-
ropean language family assisted Muller in endowing the Greeks with a
distinctly northern cultural heritage. His approach to Greek origins
redirected attention away from the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and
Phoenicia. Muller, to this extent, shared with Indo-Europeanists a

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 CHAPTER 4

troublesome tendency to limit the perceived impact that Semitic peo-

ples had had on European culture.

GREEK AND COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY:

GEORG CURTIUS AND ADOLF DEISSMANN

By the 1840s comparative philology no longer wore on the sensibilities

of classicists as it had in decades past. Despite the growing prestige of
linguistics, classical philology readily achieved peaceful coexistence with
the field. One external observer remarked in 1841 that Orientalism and
medievalism threatened to overwhelm a traditional reverence for Euro-
pean antiquity. In a chapter titled "De la Renaissance Orientale," Edgar
Quinet spoke favorably of a new humanism in Germany that focused
on the revival of Oriental texts. l.19 Classical philologists were less appre-
hensive of this intrusion than they were of other perceived threats to
the discipline. What was perceived as the waning cultural authority of
neohumanism was a topic of frequent discussion at the annual confer-
ences of classical philologists and secondary schoolmasters that met
from 1838 to 1848. Called to order by Friedrich Thiersch, the philo-
logical association defended the value of classical studies against new
demands for training in practical and natural scientific fields. Compar-
ative philology was more of an ally in this effort than an opponent.
The talk the Bonn classicist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker prepared
for the 1841 conference in his home city (but which was read by
Friedrich Ritschl due to Welcker's absence in Greece) is indicative. In
the opening to his paper "On the Meaning of Philology," Welcker ac-
knowledged "some anxiety" about the hlture of philological studies, re-
ferring to those "fly-by-night spirits" who declared that classical philol-
ogy should be incorporated within "general linguistics." He urged his
colleagues not to be alarmed by the current "furor" caused by the new
field. Even if practiced by a small number of loyal supporters, classical
studies would still retain an "inner value" and an "inner life" lacking in
profane fields. Oriental studies and Germanics were "our colonies," he
suggested, uncharted territories that could still reap a profit for the
"motherland. "l40 Welcker's preference for classical antiquity drew on
two conventional neohumanist arguments: the "eternal exemplariness"
of Greek antiquity and its national affinity with Germany. "Particularly
our national people," he recalled, "displays through language, through
its originally free social arrangements, through patriotic feelings, poetic
and speculative talents and through a most ancient religion, an espe-

190
 URBILD HELLAS

cially close affinity with the Hellenes. ,,141 Nevertheless, the distinction
linguists drew between Semitic and "Aryan peoples" proved useful to
Welcker as he debunked "the misconceived derivation of Greek gods
from Egypt" in his Greek Mythology (1857-63), published when the
then blind author was seventy-three. 142
Three years after Welcker's speech, the association welcomed Ger-
man Orientalists as a "special section" of the society. The newcomers
held separate sessions whose minutes did not form part of the official
report. As the statutes of the classicists allowed the conference to ex-
pand to include language study as a whole, the Orientalists' 1843 peti-
tion to join was accepted. In 1850 August Boeckh, serving as president
of the meeting in Berlin, opened the conference by declaring the study
of Greek and Latin grammar can "no longer dismiss its ties to compar-
ative grammar and the Indo-Germanic languages." The new principles
of linguistics were essential for a full appreciation of classical antiquity.
Setting aside the "controversy" over the influence the Levant and espe-
cially Egypt had had on early Greece, Boeckh recalled that knowledge
of Asia was essential to understanding Greece's later history, especially
in light of Persian rule in the Mediterranean. He expressed hope that
in the future a "comparative cultural history of all antiquity" would
emerge in the spirit of "comparative linguistics. ,,14,~
The first student of classical languages fully to adopt comparative
techniques was the Leipzig professor Georg Curti us, younger brother
to Ernst Curtius, the well-known archaeologist and historian who ac-
companied K. O. Muller to Delphi. Born in Lubeck in 1820, Georg
Curtius straddled in his training the best of two worlds. As a student in
Bonn and Berlin, he worked under Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl
(1806-76), Welcker, Lachmann, and Boeckh. Curti us simultaneously
pursued comparative philology with Lassen, A. W. Schlegel, and Franz
Bopp. Mter receiving advanced degrees in the classics, he joined the lin-
guist August Schleicher as a professor of classical philology in Prague,
from whence he eventually reunited with Ritschl in Leipzig in 1861.
Curti us announced in his inaugural lecture "that I have made it the
scholarly mission of my life to set classical philology ... in vital interac-
tion with generallinguistics."I44 And Leipzig was the city in which to do
so. In his twenty-five years there Curtius's followers included Friedrich
Nietzsche, as well as Hermann Osthoff, Karl Brugmann, and Ferdinand
de Saussure. He maintained friendships with the Sanskritists Albrecht
Weber, Adalbert Kuhn, and Ernst Windisch, and lived long enough to

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criticize the controversial practices of the local Neogrammarians. 145

Curtius's scholarly achievements include examining the classical
languages from a comparative perspective, as well as introducing Greek
scholars to the methods of general linguistics. His reflections in The Re-
sults of Comparative Philology in Reference to Classical Scholarship
(1845) chided the field for "the prejudice which it bore against its
young rival.,,146 Many colleagues, he noted, had been "scared from
Comparative Philology by the notion that the object of the science is
to reduce the magnificent forms of the Greek and Latin languages to
some oriental originals, and to exhibit them in the light of mere abor-
tions or mutilated remains of these eastern perfections.,,147 In an effort
to convert classical philologists into linguists, Curtius drew parallels be-
tween old copies of a lost original manuscript and the genealogical tree
of Indo- European languages. 148 The Indo-European language family,
he admitted, did "dispel the deceitful illusion that in Greece everything
had a Greek beginning. ,,149 Still, comparison and the historical method
were necessary to appreciate classical tongues individually and with sci-
entific rigor. Curtius himself developed a theory of the "more intimate
union,,150 between Greek and Latin within the larger Indo-European
family. He likewise showed how linguistics could clarifY the etymology
and morphology of Greek, as well as conjugation patterns and laws of
sound change.
Comparative philologists excelled for Curti us in a new type of
"philosophical grammar." As a strictly historical science, he feared, the
field of classics had yet to investigate the first operations of thought as
they were manifest in language. Linguists alone realized that the
human mind was most gloriously expressed in language. 151 Curtius re-
jected the attempt his Leipzig predecessor, Gottfried Hermann, had
made to identifY universal rational structures in grammar. "No longer
can one get away with explaining language," he stated, "as the prod-
uct of clever invention or even consensus or wish to derive linguistic
forms from logical categories and schematics.,,152 Rather, compara-
tivists advanced "another perspective on the nature of language" that
revealed national tongues emerging "from the natural or instinctive life
of a people, just like religion, custom, and law." Classicists would re-
main masters in exploring the "cultural side oflanguage," especially its
contributions to literature. But they must learn how linguists tackled
the "natural side," documenting how grammatical forms themselves
shaped the thought and spirit of a people. 15 .1

192
 URBlLD HELLAS

The classicist and comparative philologist Georg Curtius.

Friedrich Nietzsche realized Curtius's expectation that classicists

embrace the new philosophical concerns of German language scholars.
This student of Curtius combined training in classical philology with
linguistics as he developed his epistemological concern for language.
Already in 1862, however, Curtius observed that "the importance of

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 CHAPTER 4

comparative linguistics for philology has entered the consciousness of

classicists ... after a long enduring battle with ingrained habits and per-
sistent prejudices. ,,154 Classical philologists adapted readily to the new
view of European prehistory presented by Indo-Europeanists. Their
continued idealization of the Hellenes as the paragon of the good, the
true, and the beautiful guaranteed a place of honor for ancient Greece
within the Indo-European language family. Even comparativists them-
selves recognized the exemplary status of Greek; their work aimed in
part to explain this language more fully.I5s
A comparative-historical approach to New Testament Greek
proved more contentious than historicizing the classical Attic dialect.
Spoken around the Mediterranean world from the conquests of
Alexander to the founding of the Byzantine Empire, Koine, or "com-
mon" Greek, differed substantially in its grammar, lexicon, and phonol-
ogy from its classical predecessor. Althuugh the learned elite attempted
to "Atticize" Hellenistic texts, this form of Greek contained clear traces
of Egyptian, Persian, and Semitic languages. Classical philologists
largely ignored it, believing New Testament Greek less beautiful than
the Attic dialect. Theologians likewise neglected to historicize Hellenis-
tic Greek, revering it as a sacred tongue through which the word of
God had reached t1rst-century Christians. Both parties balked when the
Berlin theologian Adolf Deissmann (1866-1937) attempted to histori-
cize and desacralize New Testament Greek in the 1890s. Archaeologi-
cal finds of Egyptian papyri and stone inscriptions enabled Deissmann
to contextualize the language of scriptures within the everyday lan-
guage of Hellenistic speakers. He transformed what had once been re-
garded as an "isolated linguistic phenomenon,,156 into a bone of con-
tention for theologians.
The two volumes of Deissmann's Bible Studies (1895-97) criti-
cized both theologians and philologists for their "dogmatism" regard-
ing New Testament Greek. On the une hand, the former had advanced
a "doctrine of verbal Inspiration" in which the Holy Spirit merely
"used the Apostles as a pen. ,,157 As an example of this approach Deiss-
mann cited the influential Pietist and supernaturalist Richard Rothe
(1799-1867). Born in Posen, Rothe studied theology under Friedrich
Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Creuzer before in 1823
being appointed chaplain to the Prussian embassy in Rome, where he
developed a friendship with Baron von Bunsen. His work On Dogmat-
ics (1863) presented a speculative theosophy in which Rothe derived

194
 URBILD HELLAS

everything in the world from the idea of God. ls8 The third section, on
Holy Scripture, claimed one could "speak intelligibly of a language of
the Holy Ghost." "The divine spirit," Rothe wrote, "created from the
language of the people who lived in the place a very peculiar religious
language .... The Greek of the New Testament demonstrates this fact
most clearly. ,,159 This perspective entered into more formal linguistic
studies. The introduction to Hermann Cremer's Biblio-Theological Lex-
icon of New Testament Greek (1866) cited Rothe as a legitimate author-
ity on the language of scripture. 160
Philologists, on the other hand, had been equally irresponsible in
declaring the language of the New Testament to be a special dialect
used by Jews who lived among Greek speakers. The ubiquity of He-
braicisms in Hellenistic Greek suggested to Georg Benedikt Winer
(1789-1858), for example, and briefly to Julius Wellhausen, that the
language was a blend of two tongues, comparable to contemporary
Yiddish. A Protestant theologian in Leipzig, Winer in 1821 applied the
rationalist approach of his colleague Gottfried Hermann to Hellenistic
Greek grammar. His influential Treatise on the Grammar of New Testa-
ment Greek: Regarded as a Sure Basis for New Testament Exegesis pro-
posed that New Testament Greek was a "mixture of the (later) Greek
with the national (Jewish)." Winer proposed to "investigate scientifi-
cally the laws according to which the Jewish writers of the N.T. wrote
the Greek of their time." He noted the influence of a "foreign tongue
(the Hebrew-Aramaean)" and awaited the moment when New Testa-
ment Greek could be compared to the Koine of gentiles. 161
Deissmann did just this, concluding that the real language of the
New Testament was a popular, colloquial Egyptian Greek dating to the
Ptolomaic kings. In his view, Hellenistic Jews had spoken Greek as their
native tongue and only learned Aramaic as a second language; it had
not been a dialect comprehensible only to the elite. 162 Deissmann's ev-
idence was the language used by state officials on stone inscriptions and
the vernacular descriptions of private life preserved on papyrus docu-
ments. Secular Greek from the period of the Septuagint translation of
the Old Testament was, Deismann argued, identical to the "sacred"
Greek of scripture. The "Semitisms" that distinguished the Greek of
the New Testament were common to the vernacular of all Alexandri-
ans. This suggested that earliest Christianity, especially as represented
by Paul, had been a movement of the nonliterary classes.
As was the case with Hebrew, the historicization of New Testa-

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 CHAPTER 4

ment Greek opened new perspectives on religious history. Early twen-

tieth-century exegetes used a new appreciation of the language to eval-
uate, for example, whether the Gospels had been translated from Ara-
maic; the Semitic expressions that so indicated proved to be present
throughout Koine Greek. Analysis of language likewise shed light on
whether early Christians, such as Mark and Paul, were bilingual, or
whether the Greek written in individual books was schooled or collo-
quial. '6 .l The historicization of sacred Greek extended the reevaluation
of scripture that biblical philologists initiated in the early modern pe-
riod. Comparative-historical treatment of New Testament Greek con-
tributed to a drawn-out process by which scripture lost its status as the
direct word of God. The messages of the Old and New Testaments ap-
peared constrained by the historical languages used by their authors
and compilers.
Biblical philologists and classicists traveled in different intellectual
circles. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, theology and
classical studies had faced the implications of historicizing Greek along
the model of comparative-historical philology. Classicists retained their
appreciation of ancient Greece as a cultural and historical ideal, able to
subsume comparative philology into their idealization of the Hellenes.
The special status of New Testament Greek as a sacred language made
comparative-historical philology more disruptive to theologians. Nev-
ertheless, a contingent of classicists and biblical philologists shared with
comparative philologists an interest in limiting the perceived influence
of Semitic peoples on the ancient Indo-Europeans. K. O. Muller di-
verted the Greek ancestry to northern Europe, just as scholars of lan-
guage began questioning how important the ancient Hebrews had
been for the history of Christian monotheism.

196
 s
Comparative Linguistics
Race, Religion, and Historical Hgenc~, 1830-80

O n September 8, 1854, Arthur Comte de Gobineau wrote a second

letter to Germany's foremost comparative philologist, the Halle
professor August Friedrich Pott (1802-87). With reverent words he in-
quired why Pott had ignored his first epistle and had still not endorsed
his work. In June the nineteenth century's most notorious racial theo-
rist had sent Pott his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
(1853), asking for an appraisal. Gobineau reported that he held Pott's
linguistic achievements in "high esteem." The Essay, he confessed, had
been "born of roots . . . entirely German." Gobineau believed that
there was an "exact correspondence ... between language and racial
type." In his view, comparative philology could provide a "scientific
foundation" for his racist history of humanity. He hoped Pott would
submit the publication to "the examination and critique of German sci-
ence." Pott's approval was "precious" to Gobineau because German
language scholars claimed the authority to classifY human communities
and explain their historical development. Linguistics, by this time, had
established itself as a field of study in its own right, and Gobineau
wanted confirmation for his pernicious racial doctrine. Pott's silence
unsettled the French author, who repeatedly solicited his correspon-
dence over the next two years.'

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 CHAPTER 5

Gobineau was not entirely amiss in expecting a rave review. His

Essay cited Pott's research on the Indo- European family and drew heav-
ily on the writings of Pott's late mentor, Wilhelm von Humboldt. "With
regard to the special character of races," Gobineau asserted, "philology
confirms all the facts of physiology and history." In his view, linguistic
changes occurred "in exact proportion to the successive modification in
the people's blood." Grammatical structures were likewise the best mea-
sure of the relative "intelligence" and "mental stages" of races. It was a
"universal axiom," Gobineau claimed, that "the hierarchy oflanguages
is in strict correspondence with the hierarchy of races.,,2
When Pott did respond, he cautioned Gobineau not be alarmed
by what would certainly be "a candid contradiction" of his racial deter-
minism.' Pott was so incensed by the causal connections Gobineau
drew between language, race, and intellectual ability that he could not
confine his objections to the pages of the journal he edited for the Ger-
man Oriental Society. It took Pott two years to puhlish a dense mono-
graph titled The Inequality of the Human Races from the Perspective of
Linguistics (1856), which offered an alternative "survey of the relation-
ships among peoples.,,4 The book comprised one of the harshest con-
temporary responses to Gobineau's treatise. 5 Pott emphatically refuted
the conflation of language and race proposed by his adversary. Lan-
guage, in his view, pointed to clear cultural hierarchies, but these had
no material foundation in the body.
Had Gobineau so badly misinterpreted the claims of comparative
philology? Was there a precedent for his asserting that the diversity of
languages mirrored racial hierarchies and divisions? This chapter inves-
tigates the uneasy association of language, race, and religion in the
mid-nineteenth century. It identifies the contribution language schol-
ars made to the German invention of race, especially to the formulation
of the so-called Aryan myth. 6 The Bonn Indologist Christian Lassen
and his mentors, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, helped trans-
form Indo-Germans into Aryans. This chapter tracks the progressive
association of the term with the physical characteristics of linguistic
groups. It likewise follows the expansion of comparative-historical
philology to France and England. Ernest Renan (1823-92) and
Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900), both Orientalists and scholars of
religion, contributed to the field's growing international reputation at
midcentury, while popularizing the racialist distinction German com-

198
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

parativists drew between Aryans and Semites. As Maurice Oldender has

shown, discussions of race within nineteenth-century language scholar-
ship closely intersected debates on the early history of Christianity. The
distinction between "Aryan" and "Semitic" language families was part
of a larger theological effort to minimize the importance of the ancient
Hebrews in the emergence of monotheism. This endeavor, however
troubling, grew out of an Enlightenment, liberal tradition of applying
philology to critique theological orthodoxy.
The attempt to place the respective histories of language, racc,
and religion within meaningful, interrelated constellations necessarily
raised questions of mutual influence and priority. Did the material con-
ditions of the body explain how and why languages evolved and
branched out into distinct national tongues? To what extent were
grammatical structures responsible for shaping particular perceptions of
the divine? At stake were the very mechanisms and limits of linguistic
determinism, as well as larger questions of historical agency. What
drove language change over time? Was it a preexisting national spirit, a
hidden racial essence, the physical qualities of linguistic organs, the
willful intervention of speakers, chance historical events, or the laws
governing a self-determining linguistic organism? Comparative philol-
ogists tended to view the pairing of language and race as a threatening
attempt to favor the body over words in the classification of human
communities. Starting in the 1850s, turf battles with the emerging field
of physical anthropology caused language scholars across Europe to
disavow an earlier, overtly racialized conception of thc linguistic com-
munity. Some urged a new form of linguistic determinism, defending
language as a uniquely human trait and reaffirming the extent to which
words shaped cultural practices. Others confronted the materialism of
their competitors on the latter's terms. August Schleicher (1821-68)
and his followers declared the autonomy of "linguistics" as its own nat-
ural science, repudiating the humanism and historicist hermeneutics of
traditional philology.
The introduction of materialist concerns to comparative philology
did not solidify race as an analytical category. Rather, as the case of Au-
gust Schleicher will show, a natural scientific approach reinforced the
perceived autonomy of language vis-a-vis human communities. Schle-
idler's attempt to derive the diversity of languages from the material
conditions of the body actually detached words further from the will-
ful control of speakers. He insisted that the world's tongues were nat-

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 CHAPTER 5

ural organisms that evolved independently of conscious human inter-

vention. This perspective eliminated race and the Volksgeist as possible
causes of linguistic diversity, but it also begged the question of histori-
cal agency. If the soul of a people did not guide the evolution of na-
tional tongues, what did? In the 1870s the Leipzig school ofNeogram-
marians began to formulate exceptionless laws of linguistic change to
describe the growth of national tongues. Yet its main representatives
were unable to explain why language evolved so regularly despite their
situating words in relation to the physiological and psychological mech-
anisms of the body. Associating language with the material conditions
of its production eventually forced a dehistoricization of language. A
new interest in the structural and performative aspects of language
began to pierce German linguistics in the late nineteenth century, a
field that by then had distanced itself from more radically historicizing
forms of philology.

FROM INDO-GERMANS TO ARYANS: CHRISTIAN LASSEN

German philologists very early equated linguistic affinity with similari-

ties of biological descent. For Friedrich Schlegel, the presence of shared
grammatical structures implied that Persians and most Europeans
hailed from India; the diffusion of national tongues indicated migration
and the separation of human communities. Disagreement existed only
over names and historical narrative. Since the publication of Franz
Bopp's study On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit (1816), various
designations had been applied to this new conglomeration of related
peoples and tongues, including Japhetic, Sanskritic, Indo-Celtic, and
Indo-Classical. "Indo-European" was an invention of the Englishman
Thomas Young, and despite Bopp's approval it never gained currency
in German-speaking Europe. Julius Klaproth's term "Indo-Germanic"
became the accepted name for the family in 1823, likely because it cel-
ebrated the supposed inclination of the western members of the group
to expand geographically. Asia Polyglotta proclaimed the Indo-Ger-
mans to be the "most widely dispersed tribe in the world." And as Au-
gust Friedrich Port recounted: "the name seeks to unite the eastern and
western ends of the tribe in order to indicate in some measure the ge-
ographical expansion of the latter.,,7
Orientalists, moreover, interpreted the branching genealogy of
Indo- European languages as evidence for the rapid imperial expansion
of the nations that spoke them. Pott believed a propensity for territo-

200
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

rial expansion was apparent in the prehistoric migrations of Indo-Ger-

mans, as well as in the colonial conquests of modern Europeans. He re-
marked in 1840 that the westernmost branch of the tribe "now rules
over three regions of the world almost in their entirety." Its emissaries
had returned to "monstrous and mighty Asia, their own motherland"
and successfully expanded into Mrica and the Americas. Driving this
mobility was thought to be the unique grammatical structures of early
Indo- European languages, which were interpreted variously as inflec-
tive or compositing. Pott thus speculated that Indo-European domi-
nance was guaranteed "by the exquisite word bestowed upon them,
queen over all language families, a wonderful, agile, and adaptive
organ, and the true likeness of their very spirit. s The unique character
of Indo- European verbs supposedly preconditioned speakers' minds for
activity, exploration, innovation, and the spread of their culture and tra-
ditions. In other languages, the root form of the verb was thought to
remain solid and stable, hampering both cultural progress and military
conquest.
When introduced to language scholars in 1819, the term "Aryan"
grafted these migration narratives onto biblical stories of a chosen peo-
ple destined to spread the word of God. Friedrich Schlegel evoked the
label while trying to reconcile Old Testament notions of divine revela-
tion with the secular history of human origins that J. G. Rhode had
constructed from passages in the Zend-Avesta. The German word
Arier was a creation of the 1770s and a translation of Anqueitel Duper-
ron's French term Ariens, which he had derived from ancient Indic and
Persian sources. The bards in the Rig Veda, a collection of sacred
Hindu verses, apparently described their gods and themselves with the
root torm "Arya." In the founding religious text of the Zoroastrians,
the Zend-Avesta, the same root is applied to the legendary, primordial
homeland of early migrants into Iran and northern India, to these
tribes themselves, and to the regions they came to inhabit! Schlegel
ventured that Asian Aryans had been witness to God's primordial rev-
elation. The word of God had been imparted in an "Aryan language,,10
that was closely related to Avestan and Sanskrit." The ancient people
(Stammvolk) chosen to receive it were likewise called "Aryans" and
lived in the mountainous heights between Iran and India. 12 This sug-
gested to comparative mythologists that the most ancient roots of
Christianity lay in the Aryan past, not in Hebrew antiquity. For
Schlegel, the revelation of the Old Testament was a lesser derivative of

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a primordial faith still manifest in the Zend-Avesta and the Vedas.

Questionable etymologies enabled Schlegel to attribute particu-
larly close ties between modern Germans and the Aryans of antiquity.
"Our German ancestors," he wrote, had been known by the "name of
the Aryans" while still in Asia and they had been a "warlike, heroic peo-
ple." Schlegel interpreted the Sanskrit root Ari as meaning "splendid
and excellent, famous" and related it to the German word for honor,
Ehre. The frequency with which it appeared in archaic German names
for heroes pointed, in his mind, to the close historical ties between
modern German speakers and the privileged witnesses to revelation. I,
Only after 1830 did the term "Aryan" gain widespread accep-
tance among philologists. In a footnote to an article published in the
Indische Bibliothek) the Bonn Indologist Christian Lassen urged schol-
ars to use the label instead of "Indo-Germanic" because it gave a bet-
ter sense of the shared historical descent and subsequent geographical
expansion of the people. Concerned that conventional designations
were "unhistorical," the Norwegian-born student of A. W. Schlegel
recommended "Aryan" as the "common name" for the family ofIndo-
European languages, as well as for the people (Volk) that spoke them. 14
Lassen likewise prided Germans on their close connections to the
homeland. Drawing on instances where the Roman historian Tacitus
referred to an ancient Germanic tribe as "Arii," he suggested that even
among "the warlike Germans," the term "Aryan" was "not unworthy
of its honorable meaning. ,,15
During the 1830s the association between language, territorial
expansion, and cultural superiority broadened to include a more promi-
nent racial dimension. German studies of Indian prehistory racialized
the term Aryan while trying to reconcile the presence of dark-skinned
Indians on the subcontinent with notions of Aryan cultural superiority.
In an article "On the Origin of the Hindous" (1834), August Wilhelm
Schlegel proposed that the Indian "nation" was a compilation of two
"distinct races" (races differentes). Indigenous Indians had been "black
savages"; they were badly armed and lived "in vast primitive forests.,,16
Those Indians with ties to Indo-European speakers were members of
"the white race"l? and had introduced the natives to the "first rudi-
ments of civilization. ,,18 The relocation of the Aryan homeland outside
of India enabled this distinction. Schlegel concluded that the "fertile
motherland" of the Hindus lay "in the interior of the great continent,
in the area around and east of the Caspian Sea." Migrating tribes had

202
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

entered India through the Punjab region, eventually conquering the

basins of the Ganges and mixing with the local population. 19
Christian Lassen's Indian Antiquities (1847) expanded this two-
race theory of India with a more detailed study of the "original ethno-
graphic conditions of India. ,,20 The "sharp contrast in the physical ap-
pearance of the two races"ZI derived from the fact that "old inhabitants
distinct from the Aryans" once inhabited the continent. 22 These natives
had a "very black skin color with curly almost wooly hair and their own
non-Sanskrit language. ,,23 They belonged to what Lassen termed "the
black Asian race," a "raw, wild," and "uncivilized stock. ,,24 Since the
Aryan invasions, this "black race" had numbered among the "defeated
races," like "the Australian Negroes ... and the red men of America. ,,2,
Aryan J ndians, by contrast, were "a more lightly colored people" with
a "physiognomy different from the neighbors." Their "corporal struc-
ture and facial expressions"z6 proved them members of the "Caucasian
race.,,27 According to Lassen, the Aryans represented "the more per-
fectly organized, entrepreneurial and creative nation." They always
proved to be "the dominant, victorious race," successfully driving away
the "weaker, yielding" natives. 2s
Lassen defined the cultural and spiritual proclivities of Aryans in
relation to speakers of Semitic tongues. In his view, Aryans and Semites
were members of the same race; they shared a "a higher capacity for
self-reliant cultivation" and had lived in close proximity in antiquity. Yet
Lassen insisted that language revealed an "original spiritual gitt" that
Aryans only shared with other members of the language family. A "ge-
nius instilled at creation,,29 had endowed them with "higher provisions
from which sprouted everything great they accomplished." This meant
for Lassen that Aryans had "surpassed all others" in the discovery of the
practical arts, in instituting laws, civil society, and the state, and in per-
fecting the fine arts and sciences. 3o "In their ceaseless activity," he con-
cluded, the Aryans "envelop the external world and the realm of the
spirit; their aspiration is to dominate the entire globe. ,,31
Lassen's Indian Antiquities also characterized speakers of Semitic
tongues based on a set of deficiencies later echoed by Ernest Renan.
According to Lassen, subjectivity was the essential Semitic trait. It ren-
dered Semitic speakers incapable of philosophy or epic poetry and drew
them toward monotheism. Lassen claimed the Hebrew religion to be
"selfish and exclusive," denying "every other god a moment of truth."
Semitic religious practices were also "intolerant," tending toward "ta-

203
 CHAPTER 5

naticism, as to a rigid devotion to religious law." The Hebrews had

been unable to spread their religion to other peoples because they
lacked the "tolerance ... and freedom of thought" characteristic of the
mobile Aryans. 32
In the first half of the nineteenth century, German philologists did
not equate the consolidation of national unity with the recovery of the
racial purity thought to have existed in a primordial Aryan homeland.
Neither Christian Lassen nor the Schlegel brothers directly contrasted
the "tarnished" identity of Indian Aryans who had mixed with a darker
native people with a Germanic ideal of racial integrity. The differences
separating Aryans and Semites were cultural not racial, and subsequent
philologists wuuld be more concerned about the families' respective
contributions to the history of religious thought than with their bod-
ies. Nevertheless, already by the mid-1840s several major components
of "Aryan theory" as it was adopted by later racial theorists, including
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, had been articulated. Aryans were
a territorially expansive white race who were competing with Semites
for world hegemony. Modern Germans represented the westernmost
branch of the family, and language suggested that they had maintained
particularly close ties to the primordial ancestors in Asia.

THE "LINGUISTIC PHYSIOLOGY"

OF AUGUST FRIEDRICH POTT

Lassen's racialization of the Aryan language family raised the possibility

that words had a material foundation in the body. Could the diversity
of national tongues be explained by physical differences in the linguis-
tic organs of speakers? Such considerations were inimical to German
idealism but had a long history in the language sciences. Since antiq-
uity, speech had been studied in relation to the body. Aristotle located
the production of all animal voices in the lungs and windpipe and
sought to explain why human tongues alone could articulate words.
Epicurus of Samos (341-270 BC) considered the problem oflinguistic
diversity, suggesting that the exhalation of voice took a different form
based on the ethnos of speakers:13 In the early modern period, behavior-
ist models of linguistic performance likewise explained speech patholo-
gies such as stuttering or aphasia. The literature of medicine and natu-
ral philosophy attributed phonetic disturbances to the movement of the
larynx and speech organs. 34

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 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

The mind-body dichotomy proposed by Rene Descartes relegated

the corporal aspects of language to a trivialized subfield of mechanics.
He was concerned with providing a physical account of mental opera-
tions and their connections with the body:" Yet, for Descartes, the
unique status of human beings depended on the separation of language
from the natural order. In the fifth Discourse on Methods (1637), he
proclaimed speech to be the sole feature distinguishing humans from
automata. A mechanical monkey would be identical to its real counter-
part, but a true human would stand out through the ability to declare
his or her thoughts to others and to act based on reasoned reflections.
Language was both the symptom and the criterion of having a soul and
a rational mind. To locate the language faculty in the body would for
Descartes have denied its divine origins and threatened the distinction
between human and animal.
Favoring the body over the soul, eighteenth-century theorists in-
vestigated the physiological mechanisms that produced the spoken
word. Materialists, such as Charles de Brosse in his Treatise on the Me-
chanical Formation of Language (1765), encouraged physical explana-
tions of disordered verbal behavior. The physician Denis Dodart and
other French anatomists studied the organs that gave voice to lan-
guage, comparing the human body to a musical instrument. By the
1740s, experiments conducted on human and animal larynxes had clar-
ified the mechanisms of voice production. French doctors linked im-
paired speech and language deficits to anatomical defects. Physiologists
did not converse with grammarians, however. French philologists pre-
sumed the source of linguistic diversity lay in the passions or characters
of nations, not in the otherwise universal operations of the body.36 Cli-
mate and environment were the only factors thought to influence lin-
guistic difference. Warm temperatures loosened the mouth, producing
soft vowels; the cold made for terse tongues and heavy consonants. 37
In the early nineteenth century, differences in body type were thus
not held responsible for Babel. Each language was thought to embody
its own underlying idea, which gradually came to full self-realization in
the material world. Toward midcentury, comparativists nevertheless
faced a methodological quandary over how to relate language, cultural
development, and the physical bodies of speakers. Comparativists such
as August Friedrich Pott were unsettled by the "contradictions and un-
certainties ,,3& that surrounded the concept of race. Pott considered him-
self a strict "ethnographer and linguist" and established what he be-

205
 CHAPTER 5

lieved to be a secure foundation for systematically relating the physical

and spiritual life of a nation. ,0 Like many of his contemporaries, though,
Pott eventually retreated from the type of materialist determinism that
the racial classification of human communities entailed. His attempt to
negotiate the intersection of words and bodies ultimately ran afoul of
his liberal political views, and Pott lashed out against all who overtly
conflated language and race.
As a student of Franz Bopp, Pott helped define the first genera-
tion of self-professed German linguists, Orientalists who institutionally
and intellectually distanced themselves from textual philologists and
theologians. "General linguistics" (allgemeine SprachlVissenschaft), Pott
argued in 1849, must "distinguish itself from its sister, philology." The
field's particular mission was to investigate the "nature and origin of
language generally as a characteristic of man from both the physical and
psychological perspective." Based on the results, linguists should
"group together or separate humanity into ... orders of relation based
on race, nation [Volk], and language.,,4o Pott, in other words, set on sci-
entific footing the genealogical project of ordering languages and na-
tions. Perceiving the biblical account of national genealogies to be a
threat still worthy of response in 1863, he lashed out against the notion
that the Mosaic tables contained divine inspiration. Theologians such as
Franz Kaulcn who speculated on the language that Adam and Eve
spoke in paradise were guilty of "unauthorized involvement in matters
that are ourS.,,41 Moses was no linguist, according to Pott, and any vi-
sion of the past based on scripture must appear "strangely displaced and
distorted. ,,42
Born into a family of Lutheran clerics in the Kingdom of Han-
nover, Pott lost his father at age nine and later received a stipend to
pursue theological studies in Gottingen. He turned to philology after
taking lectures in classical languages from G. L. Dissen and K. O.
Muller and absorbing the legacy of Michaelis's biblical criticism. Franz
Bopp oversaw the completion of his training and, along with Wilhelm
von Humboldt, helped him obtain a chair, which Pott himself termed
General Linguistics at the University of Halle. Here Pott had ties to
the Young Hegelians, especially to Arnold Ruge. He contributed to
Ruge's Hallesche Jahrbiicher fiir deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst,
which Marx continued as the Deustch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher in
Paris. 4 .1 In the polarized atmosphere of the University of Halle, where

206
The comparative philologist August Friedrich Pott.
 CHAPTER 5

theological orthodoxy battled its rationalist detractors, Pott suffered a

reputation as anti theological, rationalist, and democratic.
The introduction to Pott's most influential work, Etymological
Studies of Indo-Germanic Languages (1833) outlined a comparative
method that took into consideration the bodies of speakers. The book
expanded Bopp's Comparative Grammar, adding a lexical component
to his analysis of verb roots. As Grimm had done for the Germanic
tongues, Pott examined similarities in the morphological structures of
five Indo-European languages, establishing their affinity through
shared sound changes. Phonetics was the key to etymology for Pott.
He contributed to the establishment of fixed laws of phonetic change
and developed the first comparative phonetic tables, setting an example
for later Neogrammarians. 44
Pott termed his comparative method "linguistic physiology"
(Sprachphysiologie) to emphasize that language was "dependent on
[man] ... as a spiritual and corporal being of nature. ,,4, In his view, na-
tional tongues differed in part due to "the physical language apparatus
of man. ,,46 This required that comparative philology be subdivided into
three areas of study: the philosophical, the physical, and the historical.
"What else," Pott asked, "except the study of language, craniums, and
customs [Sprachen-, Schiidel-, und Sittenstudium] will ever disentangle
tht: wt:b of nations that entwines the globe?,,47 According to his scheme,
philologists should first dissect the "anatomy" of language as if it were
an "organic natural object. ,,48 Pott sorted languages by their "genus"
and "species," measuring formal similarities in grammar and phonology
to elucidate the "structure and linguistic character" of each. 49 Secondly,
the philologist needed familiarity with the "physical habitat" of a lan-
guage's speakers and their bodies. Finally, Pott suggested, national
groups should also be viewed in light of political, religious, and legal
history, as language "retained in its faithful memory the timbre and
many tones of their collective fate. ,,50
Indo-European speakers, in his view, constituted a community of
shared parentage. "Across Orient and Occident," he wrote in 1833,
"from the breasts of Bengal to the Atlantic Ocean, there extends one,
rarely broken chain of kindred peoples. ,,51 According to Pott, speakers
of Indo-European tongues had left a primordial Asian homeland,
which had also been cradle to the "first corporal and spiritual powers of
humanity": "Ex oriente lux! ... the flow of culture has for the most al-
ways followed the sun. The nations of Europe once lay on Asia's

208
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

breasts, and she, the mother, embraced them as children."s2 Pott him-
self restricted the term "Aryan" to only one of the five recognized
branches of the Indo-European language family, the Medo- Persian
tongues. 53 He likewise insisted on the disparate origins of Semitic and
Indo- European peoples. Yet Pott was the first comparativist to include
the Sinti and Roma within the family ofIndo-European speakers. The
"gypsies" actually have a much closer connection to India than the de-
scendents of the Goths, having left the Punjab region at the end of the
first millennium AD. In 1844 Pott defended Romany's status as a "real
national language," denying that it was "thieves' Latin" used as a secret
idiom for organizing swindles and robbery. In his view, the language
descended from "the already degenerate forms of popular Indian di-
alects.,,54 Despite its "exceeding bastardization and depravity," it could
take pride in "having blood relations with splendid Sanskrit. ,,55
For many comparativists the decision of whether to apply the
term "Aryan" to the entire family of Indo-European languages or
merely to the Iranian branch hinged on the frequency with which
derivatives of the root "arya" appeared in related languages. The
Genevan scholar Adolphe Pictet, for example, derived the name Ireland
from "arya" and embraced the broader designation in The Origins of
the Indo-Europeans or the Primitive Aryans (1859). August Schleicher
and K. J. Windischmann likewise cited Tacitus's references to the Ger-
manic tribe Arii to justifY calling the entire family "Aryan," while
Friedrich Ruckert's student Paul Lagarde preferred the restricted
meaning. 56 German comparativists directed their attention almost ex-
clusively to the "superior" languages of the Indo-European family.
They rarely found it worthwhile to draw Semitic languages into the
comparison or to examine other language families in detail. By 1890
German linguistics had virtually ceased to lise the term Aryan except to
refer to Indo- Iranian tongues. This restriction was a defensive measure
to protect the language sciences from new fields such as anthropology,
comparative law, and religion, as well as racial theory, which had appro-
priated the term from philologists and expanded its applicability be-
yond words and grammar. 57
By the 1840s actual physiologists had located the general faculty
of language in specialized lobes of the brain. Based on the placement
of lesions in patients who experienced loss of speech, phrenologists
outlined the anatomy of the central nervous system in its supposed re-
lation to the production of language and intelligence. 58 German

209
 CHAPTER 5

anatomists suggested that such findings aided the classification of

tongues. The anatomist and early anthropologist Adolf Bastian asserted
that languages differed according to the "physiological racial type" of
speakers. The "racial formation of the vocal tools" determined how
sounds for given objects were produced.'9 In 1851 the zoologist Carl
Vogt suggested that the shape of the cranium was responsible for lin-
guistic diversity. In his view, highly developed "frontal hemisphere
lobes" produced languages "rich in expressions for abstract concepts,"
the opposite encouraged "a material wealth in sounds, roots, and gram-
matical movement." People with receding foreheads and jaws that jut-
ted out thus lacked the faculty for abstract reasoning. Karl Penka later
claimed to have located the source of Indo-European inflection in the
shape of speakers' skulls. Physical differences among conquered tribes
explained for him the diffusion of an original Aryan Ursprache; a phys-
ical cause lay behind the Germanic sound shifts."O In 1876 the Austrian
linguist Friedrich Muller derived the world's language families from
three different hair types, wooly, straight, and curled. 61
Pott's linguistic physiology had no room for such considerations.
The limits of his flirtation with materialism were already apparent in
1833. Pott assumed language embodied the subjective character of its
speakers. Words were not inert products of the body. Rather, each na-
tional tongue possessed its own "spirit" (Sprachgeist). This Pott com-
pared to a "heavenly flame that lives and flutters in the letter. ,,62 His
ambitions were just as much philosophical as they were ethnographic.
According to Pott, "if you wish to get to know humanity and its rea-
son, then learn the languages of humanity. ,,63
In his review of Gobineau, Pott defended in rather tortured prose
his liberal and idealist principles. The Inequality of the Human Races
apparently aroused Richard Wagner's interest in racial doctrine, yet
Pott denounced Gobineau's "chemistry of nations" in no uncertain
terms. Pott's argument against racial determinism built on a traditional
humanist faith in the perfectibility of man as a rational, free being.
Gobineau had falsely equated humans with the "sedate matter ... of
the chemist," which was "eternally condemned to follow set and un-
changing laws." Gobineau's vision of "insurmountable racial necessity
as set by nature" contradicted Pott's confidence in the individual as a
"free personality capable of self-determination." For Pott, the fate of
nations was not predetermined by "ethnic gifts presented in the cra-
dle.,,64 Man had the ability to make of himself what he willed, a con-

210
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

viction related to Pott's liberal politics. He reproached Gobineau for

being "no democrat," insisting that the ideal state was not pregiven,
but "a creation of freedom and human self-determination. ,,65 Gob-
ineau's second sin was to deny clear evidence of human progress
through history. Pott objected to the notion that racial mixing neces-
sarily resulted in "degeneration and inescapable social corruption.,,66
Nations that Gobineau condemned to "moral and intellectual degen-
eration" were for Pott nothing less than "underdeveloped children"
who could still redeem themselves. 67
Language study, in Pott's view, presented a more precise method
for classifying human communities because it highlighted the "spiritual
dividing lines" between nations. 68 Language, not race, was "the truly
characteristic and tangible lineament that distinguishes nations, to
some extent almost the only one. ,,69 It was, moreover, the "barometer
of intellectual development." Pott hesitated to equate the structure of
a language with the cultural achievements of its speakers; the "instru-
mental value" of a language did not exactly parallel the "level of a peo-
pie's culture." He conceded, for example, that Africa was "irrefutably
of all corners of the world the most unwieldy, a truly unarticulated and
dismembered stump." But Pott recalled that not a single one-syllable
language had been found there, as had been found in China and
India. 70 Along with the Hebraicist Heinrich Ewald, he was one of the
first comparativists to study Bantu languages/I and much of Pott's cri-
tique drew on Mrican and Native American examples. 72
Comparativists, such as Pott, who correlated national tongues,
mental ability, and the physical body, tended to prioritize language as
exerting the most powerful influence on cultural production and the
worldview of speakers. Nevertheless, Pott did subscribe in muted form
to an ideal of racial, national, and linguistic unity. Racial theory was not
off-limits to progressive liberals. 73 Many midcentury philologists in-
stead redefined race to accommodate a form of linguistic, rather than
biological, determinism. Racialist discourse thoroughly permeated re-
search on the Indo- European and Semitic language families, as the
cases of Friedrich Max Muller and Ernst Renan indicate, even if most
comparativists rejected a reduction of linguistic diversity to biology.

PHONOLOGY vs. ETHNOLOGY: FRIEDRICH MAX MULLER

The growing tension between philology and ethnology is exemplified

in the work of Friedrich Max Muller, a prolific Orientalist who intro-

211
 CHAPTER 5

duced German notions of Aryan antiquity to Britain. While hardly the

first representative of the field abroad, Max Muller solidified the fame
and interdisciplinary appeal of comparative philology outside the Ger-
man states. Few did more than Max Muller to popularize the image of
an "Aryan race" or more than Ernest Renan to stigmatize so-called
Semites. Race entered their linguistic work in the context of an admit-
tedly liberal approach to the comparative history of religion and
mythology. Philologists since the Enlightenment had drawn upon lin-
guistic and historical evidence to challenge biblical orthodoxy. Like
other mythographers Max Muller expected his research on the Aryan
past to reconfigure Christian religious narratives without relying on the
Bible and thereby to renew contemporary religious consciousness. 74
His and Renan's attempts to "Aryanize" the origins of Christianity
drew on a quasi-racial form of linguistic determinism in which gram-
matical structures shaped culturally specific perceptions of the divine.
Comparative- historical philology arrived in Britain well before
Max Muller. And as in Germany, the field spawned the related disci-
plines of ethnology and prehistory. In the 1810s James Cowles
Prichard (1786-1848), a doctor in Bristol, learned German and intro-
duced himself to comparative methods. A newly converted Anglican of
Quaker descent, Prichard used philology to both defend monogeni-
cism and illuminate the cultural origins of contemporary Britons. His
Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813) advanced the contro-
versial thesis that Sanskrit had descended from Hebrew. Celtic, in his
view, was a missing link between the two language families. 7s Prichard's
Eastern Origins of the Celtic Nations (1831) likewise traced the Celtic
ancestry to an Asian homeland. The author sought to free the Irish
from the contempt in which the Celts were held by proving that the
Saxons had been less civilized than the Indo- European ancestors of the
Irish themselves.?6
In 1843 Prichard introduced British audiences to the German
term "ethnology," presenting a field aimed at tracing the historical
roots of linguistic communities. His presentation to the British Associ-
ation for the Advancement of Science explained how "ethnological
philology" used language to classifY the world's peoples. 77 For Prichard
the study of physical features was subordinate to the dictates ofphonol-
ogy and grammar. Bodily features and structures were studied but re-
mained subsidiary to linguistic concerns. 7S This approach to human
communities was paradigmatic of British ethnology in the first half of

212
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

the century and lent authority to comparative philologists who pro-

claimed language the quintessential human trait.?9
Despite the precedent of William Jones, neither comparative
philology nor Oriental studies made significant inroads in early nine-
teenth-century Britain. The politics of deriving national ancestry from
a south Asian homeland were far more risky across the channel than in
the German states, given the reality of British imperialism. Not until
1832 did a British university create a chair in Oriental languages. The
newly founded University of London hired Friedrich August Rosen,
who had studied under Franz Bopp in Berlin. Even then the position
was the result of a private endowment and intended to promote the
translation of the Bible into Sanskrit. Similarly, the type of historical re-
search that culminated in the Oxford English Dictionary lagged behind
in Britain. Not until the 1830s did two Old- English scholars, Benjamin
Thorpe (1782-1870) and John Mitchell Kemble (1807-57), who had
studied abroad with Rasmus Rask and Jacoh Grimm, approach Anglo-
Saxon historically. so
A German emigre, not surprisingly, introduced British audiences
to the term "Aryan" and popularized narratives of shared Asian de-
scent. Born in Dessau, Friedrich Max Muller studied philology with
Gottfried Hermann in Leipzig and with Bopp and Friedrich Ruckert in
Berlin before moving to England in 1846 to secure funding and pre-
pare an edition of the Rig Veda. Through Baron Christian von Bunsen,
Prussian minister at Victoria's court and a proficient Egyptologist in his
own right, Max Muller acquired a professorship of modern languages
at Oxford in 1851 and eventually received the first British chair in com-
parative philology in 1868. From 1861 to 1863 he entertained a cap-
tivated London public with his brilliantly delivered Lectures on the Sci-
ence of Language. At the Royal Institution Max Muller spoke to full
halls on topics ranging from the supposed Aryan and Turanian lan-
guage families to comparative mythology and Kantian philosophy.
Max MLiller shared similar expectations with Bunsen regarding
the contributions comparative philology could make to ethnology and
the history of religion. In a terse exchange that started their friendship,
Ernest Renan accused Max Muller of pilfering Bunsen's unreliable term
"Turanian" to refer to tongues not included in either the Indo- Euro-
pean or Semitic families. Max Muller, like Bunsen, assumed that lan-
guage and religion offered the clearest evidence of humanity's earliest
state of consciousness. Philology could also unlock the sacred books of

213
 CHAPTER 5

the world's religions and reveal parallels in the development of lan-

guage and thought. Bunsen's Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal
History Applied to Language and Religion ( 1854) argued for Christian-
ity's continuity with the ancient religions of India and Egypt. Max
Muller pursued a similar argument in relation to the Vedas, seeking in
the sacred texts clues to every aspect of Aryan antiquity.8!
As the oldest book of humanity, the Rig Veda, according to Max
Muller, provided a rare glimpse of the "primitive and undivided family
of the Aryan nations. ,,82 He found evidence in the epic of a racial kin-
ship linking Britons and Aryans in Asia. At a special session of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, Max Muller for
this reason criticized British scholars who denied Sanskrit's influence on
modern Bengali. 83 This ignorance wrongly separated Britain's colonial
subjects from a glorious Aryan past and obscured for Max Muller "the
ethnographic and linguistic relations" of contemporary Indians. s, Fol-
lowing Christian Lassen, Max Muller presented a "two-race" theory of
Indian civilization. so Scholars were wrong who assumed all Indians be-
longed "one great branch of the Caucasian race. ,,86 Language proved
otherwise. Modern Indian dialects were divided into "two great
classes." The northern languages had "strong claims to an Indo-Ger-
manic origin," while those in the south were "more closely connected
with the language of aboriginal and non -Brahminical inhabitants of
India. ,,87 The Vedas "put it beyond all doubt" that the former could be
traced to a "Brahmanical people ... of Arian origin" who had immi-
grated into India from Iran. 88 This people had "crushed and extin-
guished" the "savage and despised" masses of aboriginal inhabitants,
who fled to the forests and mountains or were enslaved. 89
On the one hand, this narrative suggested to Max Muller conti-
nuity between British colonizers and the Aryan conquerors of antiq-
uity. He depicted the "English armies" who were occupied in subdu-
ing hostile Indian groups as "descendents of the same race, to which
the first conquerors and masters of India belonged." The British had
"return[ ed] . . . to their primordial soil, to accomplish the glorious
work of civilization, which had been left unfinished by their Arian
brethren. ,,90 On the other hand, Max Muller concluded that language
proved the racial identity of Englishmen and elite Indians. "No author-
ity" besides comparative philology, he wrote in 1854, could "convince
the English soldier that the same blood was running in his veins, as in
the veins of the dark Bengalese .... And yet there is not an English

214
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

jury now-a-days, which, after examining the hoary documents of lan-

guage, would reject the claim of a common descent and a legitimate
relationship between Hindu, Greek and Teuton. ,,91 As the biographer
Nirad Chaudhuri has noted, Max Muller's notion of a common Aryan
family fanned Hindu nationalism and the self-conscious Aryanism of
Indians who demanded greater self-determination based on their pre-
sumed affinity with Europeans. 92 His later disavowal of language as an
indication of racial affinity likely stemmed from the discomfort this vi-
sion of kinship presented to the British.
Friedrich Max Muller spent the remainder of his career disentan-
gling this conflation of words and bodies. He retained the term "race"
as a general designation for Aryans and other linguistic communities,
but distinguished "ethnological race" from "phonological race." In his
Letter to Chevalier Bunsen on the Classification of the Turanian Lan-
guages (1853), Max Muller proposed that the relationship between eth-
nology and philology should be no more than "mutual advise and sug-
gestion." Bunsen had earlier proposed classifYing all of mankind
according to language. Max Muller countered that the two fields were
"not commensurate," and no compromise should obscure the "glaring
contradictions" between them. The student of physiology, he wrote,
should pursue his own science, "unconcerned about language": "Let
him see how far the skulls, or the hair, or the colour, or the skin of dif-
ferent tribes admit of classification; but to the sound of their words his
ear should be as deaf as that of the ornithologist's to the notes of caged
birds." This rebuttal established if not "a complete divorce, at least ...
a judicial separation between the study of Philology and the study of
Ethnology.,,93 As Thomas Trautmann has noted, Max Muller on occa-
sion violated his own principles, searching, for example, for historic
traces of Aryan noses in Sanskrit texts. 94 But the Indologist continually
stressed the impossibility of speaking of "an Aryan race, of Aryan blood,
or Aryan skulls, and to attempt ethnological classification on purely lin-
guistic grounds. ,,95
The emergence in Britain of a physical anthropological approach
to race undercut the priority Prichard and Max Muller once claimed for
language as an indication of genealogical descent. Starting in the 1850s
comparative philology began recanting its authority to pass judgment
on race as a physical category, deferring to natural scientists who mea-
sured skulls and skin pigments. Speaking to British anthropologists,
Max Muller, for example, denied that the three main skull types

215
 CHAPTER 5

(dolichocephalic, orthognathic, and euthycomic) could ever corre-

spond to his scheme of Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian tongues. "Who,
then would dare at present to lift up a skull and say that this skull must
have spoken an Aryan language," he asked, "or lift up a language and
say this language must have been spoken by a dolichocephalic skull?"
This reluctance resulted from the realization that language study could
never take the researcher back to the origins of human beings as a dis-
tinct biological species. As George Stocking has noted, the discovery of
skeletal remains vastly expanded the short biblical chronology for
human history. Racial differences were assumed to have emerged over
vastly longer time periods, far earlier than the first appearance of Indo-
European Ianguages. 96
After midcentury, Max Muller and other Orientalists focused their
efforts instead on reconstructing the cultural life of the first Aryans be-
fore their departure from an Asian homeland. The German scholar
Adalbert Kuhn, a friend of Max Muller's from Berlin, announced this
intention in 1855. As Jacob Grimm did in the History of the German
Language (1848), Kuhn assumed that words found in two or more re-
lated languages "extend beyond the history of only one of the family'S
nations and must illuminate the history of the Urvolk.,,97 In 1859
Adolphe Pictet coined the term "linguistic paleontology" to describe
the historical research of philologists. Like Max Muller, these authors
agreed that the original Indo- Europeans had inhabited a temperate eli-
mate with mountains and waterways. They also concurred on the sup-
posedly high level Indo-Germanic culture. The Urvolk had presided
over a highly structured system of family, state, and regional organiza-
tion; it had developed agriculture and possessed almost all domesti-
cated animals; and the earliest Indo- Europeans knew how to mine and
work the most important metals. 9M
Max Muller's contribution to this research was to explain how the
structures of Indo-European languages shaped thought and religious
beliefs. Philology, in his view, could distill continuities in the thought
patterns oflinguistic groups. "There is no Aryan race in blood," he an-
nounced in Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas (1887), but
whoever has received "the Aryan blessing" belongs to that "unbroken
spiritual succession" that united "the tl.rst apostles of that noble
speech" with "the present day. ,,99 Max Muller took the cultural conti-
nuity language provided quite literally, suggesting in the foreword to
his English translation of The Critique of Pure Reason (1881): "While

216
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

in the Veda we may study the childhood, we may study in Kant's cri-
tique the perfect manhood of the aryan mind. ,,100 Having studied Kan-
tian philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Max Muller envisioned
himself extending Hamann's, Herder's, and Humboldt's attempts to
integrate language into a theory of the mind. lol His Science of Thought
(1887) thus proposed that there was "No Reason without Language,
No Language without Reason." Meaning and articulate sound were,
for Max Muller, "two sides" of an indivisible entity such as a coin or an
. pee.I lO2
orange an d Its
Philologists, by implication, could deduce from historical tongues
how the speakers of each had reasoned at a given moment in time. Lan-
guage offered Max Muller an "archives" or "annals" in which the "his-
torical development of the human mind" was preserved. 103 Thus, he
hoped to interpret Indian mythology by reducing "every thought that
crossed the Indian mind" to the "offspring" of some 120 "mother-
ideas," simple concepts or root forms. 104 According to Max Muller, the
original roots of human speech had neither been imitations of natural
sounds (the "bow-wow" theory) nor involuntary interjections (the
"pooh-pooh" theory). Rather, they reflected "inward mental phases.,,105
The Biographies of Words purportedly identified the basic 800 roots of
Sanskrit, just as Ernest Renan isolated 500 original roots in Hebrew.
Transferring linguistic categories to religion was justified, accord-
ing to Max Muller, by the historical role words and metaphors had
played in the emergence of belief. One of the first comparative mythol-
ogists, he assumed that humans had been driven by their natural per-
ception of the infinite in the historical world to name and give voice to
the divine. The growth of words and concepts documented a dialecti-
cal struggle on the part of the mind to transcend the materiality of lin-
guistic expression. As a result, the primary elements of religion were for
Max Muller not rituals, customs, or sacrifices, but words and texts
whose true meaning only etymology could divulge. In his view, for ex-
ample, the tripartite division of languages warranted a parallel classifi-
cation of religious practices. Semitic speakers supposedly presented
God in history; Aryans saw the divine in nature; and the ambiguous
Turanian family worshiped natural and ancestral spirits. 106
Mythology, the first stage of religion, was in Max Muller's famous
formulation a "disease of language. "lO7 The original meaning of roots
had been material, in his view, derived from the impressions speakers
had of their surroundings. But names had a tenuous relationship to the

217
 CHAPTER 5

objects they represented. Each designated an object based on a sensi-

ble attribute; these could be numerous and imprecise. The original
bond between a word and its object was also quickly forgotten, as
metaphors expanded this primitive, sensual vocabulary. According to
Max Muller, myths and stories of divine personalities emerged from
misinterpretations of a word's original meaning. Phonetic decay and
the invention of false etymologies likewise blurred the history of
signs. 10H Max Muller believed that terms for the sun and other solar
phenomena were the sources of Aryan mythology. Both he and Renan
took from Eugene Burnouf the notion that names (nomina) became
divine powers (numina). The idols and various divinities of all heathen
religions emerged from the multiplicity of names used in liturgy.
Philology peeled back the layers of confusion surrounding the ori-
gin of religious thought, according to Max Muller, and indicated that
the Aryans of Vedic India had experienced an original form of
monotheism. Christianity, in Max Miiller's view, was the culmination of
all religion, the first faith to give voice to the idea of the true God. Its
roots, however, extended further back than Hebrew antiquity. Contra-
dicting Ernest Renan, Max Muller denied that the "Semitic instinct"
had given birth to monotheism. In his view, both Aryans and Semites
had experienced a "primitive intuition of God" that could only have re-
sulted from an original divine revelation. 109 The expression of this feel-
ing merely differed according to the peculiarities of national tongues.
Aryans tended toward polytheism because they were "less fettered" in
their linguistic expression; the roots of their first language referred to
activities rather than sedate states. Semitic speakers called on God in
"adjectives only" or in words that conveyed a predicative meaning.
They thus had the benefit of a language that expressed the "abstract
qualities of the deity." llCl
This linguistic sleight of hand enabled Max Muller to undermine
the ancient Hebrews in the one area they threatened to surpass the
Aryans: the invention of monotheism. "Our forefathers," he reported,
discovered "the wisdom of Him who is not the God of the Jews." 111
Religion and civilization had spread westward from India, and, accord-
ing to Max Muller, the imperialistic Aryans still had a mission to link
all parts of the world with their cultural practices. Grammatical struc-
tures destined the Aryans to be the "prominent actors in the great
drama of history." The "Aryan nations," Max Muller concluded, were

218
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

assured victory in the "struggle ... with the Semitic and Turanian
races. " I l l His linguistic determinism closely resembled a racialist view
of world history, even if it celebrated words and conjugation patterns
rather than the Aryan body.
By the late 1860s German anthropologists had all but rendered
comparative philology irrelevant in discussions of the Aryan race. As
Andrew Zimmerman has argued, nearly all the practices of anthropol-
ogy, centered as they were on the collecting, measuring, and display of
ubjects, originated in a distrust of language and narrative. 113 The head
of the Berlin Anthropological Society, Rudolf Virchow, specifically re-
jected linguistic genealogies as an indication of whether Europeans
were of Aryan descent in "The Overpopulation of Europe" (1874).
Virchow credited Friedrich Max Muller with having divided the conti-
nent's inhabitants into Aryans, Semites, and Turanians. But he feared
only archaeology and the study of pigment and craniums could prevent
"the decision about the ethnological standing of a people" from being
"surrendered to the hands of language scholars." Virchow confined
philologists to making judgments about the political alliances of human
communities and their historical fate. In his view, language revealed
nothing about "blood relations"; it merely "nationalizes and de-na-
tionalizes." To evaluate whether Europeans were of Aryan descent, an-
thropologists had to consider the physiological ideal of the race. In the
mid -1870s Virchow thus solicited the help of schoolteachers in gather-
ing the physical data necessary to classifY the inhabitants of imperial
Germany but neglected considerations of language. I 14
As the definition of the Aryan physical type fell to anthropolo-
gists, Indians were excluded from the family, limiting the term's appli-
cability to a small, original white population. I I, The Aryan homeland
likewise moved further westward to northern Germany itself. The
prospect that Europeans had racial ties to Indian Aryans forced a rever-
sal of the biblical migration narratives that once traced the German an-
cestry back to an Asian Garden of Eden. The British ethnologist Robert
Latham was the first to argue that Sanskrit speakers originated on the
southeastern border of Lithuania in the Baltic regions. His Elements of
Comparative Philology (1862) denied any substantial ties between San-
skrit and the modern languages of India. It was far more likely, in his
view, that one language had traveled east, than that a larger assembly
had departed India. 116 This perspective seemed to be confirmed by the

219
 CHAPTER 5

discovery of ancient skeletal remains, such as the bones of Neanderthal

man found in a limestone cave in Rhenish Prussia in 1857 and those
discovered in Brixham Cave in 1858.
A debate then ensued over whether the Aryans had originated in
Asia or Europe. Several linguists supported the idea of an Asian home-
land based on the supposed affinities between the Semitic and Indo-Eu-
ropean language families.'l? In 1873 the Orientalist Friedrich Delitzsch
reported that only he himself, Pott, and August Schleicher denied the
possibility of an Urverwandtschaft. Others, including Lassen, Renan,
Burnouf, and Pictet, accepted the possibility of an early connection. lls
The Europeanist camp mustered linguistic, anthropological, and ar-
chaeological evidence to elevate Proto-Germans into the exalted posi-
tion once held by ancient Indians. In 1868 Theodor Benfey placed the
Aryan Urheimat just north of the Black Sea, between the Caspian Sea
and the mouth of the Danube. This was justified, in his view, by the fact
that there were no Proto-Indo-European words for lions, tigers, or
camels. 119 Lazar Geiger claimed in 1869 that only middle and western
Germany had the tree vegetation necessary to explain lexical similarities
in Indo-European languages. The beech tree, whose name supposedly
remained constant throughout the family, had not yet reached Holland
at the start of the Christian period, but could be found in the Baltic
provinces of Prussia. 120 Similarly, 1. G. Cuno assumed the Indo-Euro-
peans had originated where most of their current members now lived.
Only northern Germany and eastern Europe could have provided a
continuous space large enough to host what he assumed to have been
an original population numbering in the millions. 121 Scholars in favor of
Asian origins countered these arguments with the fact that salt was
known to Europeans but not found in tongues directly descended from
Sanskrit. 122
The allure of Europe representing the primordial Aryan home-
land derived from racialist arguments concerning the body. In 1878
Theodor Posche dubbed Indo-Europeans "the blonds," describing the
family as a "special, very distinguished human tribe" whose homeland
was in eastern Europe, not Asia. Rudolf Virchow himself claimed in
1884 that based on skin pigmentation, hair color, and skull formation
"a kind of autochthonism was to be established for the peoples built ac-
cording to Germanic type in the north." The Scandinavian Karl Penka
concurred that Europeans were a blond race with dolichocephalic skulls
who had conquered Europe from the north. In the early 1900s prehis-

220
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

toric archaeologists such as Gustaf Kossinna likewise rallied the mate-

rial evidence of weapons and tools to locate the Indo-European home-
land along the western coast of the Haltic and bordering areas of the
North Sea.123 The new priority that bodies and material artifacts held
over words in the classification of human communities reversed the
Aryan myth as it had been invented by comparative philologists. As the
I tali an Enrico de Michelis stated, by 1903 Asia was no longer "the cra-
die but the grave the Aryans."I24

ERNEST RENAN AND THE "LANGUAGES OF STEEL"

If Friedrich Max Muller fabricated images of an "Aryan race," compar-

ative philology's most vocal advocate in France created its foil in a
"Semitic race." Race and religion were the cornerstones of the He-
braicist Ernest Renan's language studies. Like Max Muller he brought
linguistic evidence to bear on the history of religion, extrapolating from
characteristic grammatical forms maxims that purportedly illuminated
the inner life of "Semites." Renan's fame derives largely from his im-
mensely popular Life ofJesus (1863), a controversial text for which he
was expelled from his chair in Hebrew, Chaldean, and Sryiac at the Col-
lege de France. In 1835 D. F. Strauss had distressed the German theo-
logical establishment by arguing that scriptural accounts of Jesus's life
were mere myths grounded in Jewish messianic expectations. 125 Renan
shocked Catholic ecclesiastics by denying the divinity of Jesus and
stressing the aesthetic and emotional appeal of Christianity over super-
natural aspects of the faith. Philology was the demon that took Renan
on the path to sacrilege. His research into the origin of religious
thought began with the study oflanguage in the 1840s. The force with
which language influenced the cultural practices of speakers sufficed for
Renan as an explanation for why the ancient Hebrews had experienced
monotheism but failed at other forms of historical progress.
When Renan applied the techniques of comparative philology to
the Semitic tongues in the 1840s he reaped the fruits of a discipline that
had cultivated an early French connection. Paris had once been the cov-
eted haven of Europe's aspiring OrientaIists; many German compara-
tivists trained in the French capital. Some, such as Julius K1aproth or
Julius Mohl, chose to stay where the manuscripts were more plentiful
and the opportunities for learning Sanskrit, Farsi, Turkish, Arabic, or
Assyrian more abundant. 126 Centers for studying non-European lan-
guages, such as the Ecole des langues orientales vivantes (est. 1795) and

221
 CHAPTER 5

the Societe asiatique de Paris (est. 1822), were available at an early date
in France. l27 Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) had
supplied the royal library with a stock of manuscripts useful for learning
languages other than Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. 128 Based
on Persian sources, he published in 1771 the first Latin translation of
the Zend-Avesta. This attracted the eye of the Farsi and Arabic scholar
Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), who in 1793 deciphered the Pahlavi in-
scriptions of the Sassanid kings. When Napoleon declared all English-
men on French soil to be prisoners of war in 1802, Alexander Hamil-
ton, a member of the Asiatick Society of Calcutta was trapped in Paris
and catalogued Sanskrit manuscripts. A French translation of Jones's
Asiatick Researches had appeared in 1803, and Hamilton became a mag-
net for continental Europeans interested in the language. His students
included Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp, but also the first French
Sanskritist, Antoine- Uonard de Chezy (1774-1832), who received the
first European chair in that language at the College de France in 1814.
This generation of French Orientalists was disinclined toward ap-
proaching language comparatively and historically given the persistence
of a national tradition of universal or philosophical grammar. 129 In the
sixteenth century Port-Royal grammarians had evoked language com-
parison while searching for the rational structures of the mind, and
early French Orientalists continued to approach language in this vein.
Silvestre de Sacy, for example, published an essay called Principles of
General Grammar in 1803, issuing reprints in 1810 and 1815. There
was no French equivalent to the massive comparative charts published
in J. C. Adelung's Mithridates(1806). Schlegel's Essay on the Language
and Wisdom of the Indians was not translated into French until 1837.
When France lost three of its founding Orientalists, Fraw;:ois Champol-
lion, Chezy, and J, P. Abel-Reumsat in 1832, the avant-garde of lan-
guage studies had long since passed to German grammarians.
The young Christian Lassen helped transplant the techniques of
comparative-historical philology across the Rhine when he received a
Prussian state grant to study Sanskrit manuscripts in 1824. Under his
guidance, a fellow student of Chezy, Eugene Burnouf (1801-52), ap-
plied German scholarship to Pali, the sacred language of Buddhists in
Sri Lanka and Indochina. Cowritten with Lassen, Burnouf's Essay on
Pdli (1826) argued that the liturgical language had evolved from San-
skrit. The work marked the first application of historical grammar to

222
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

the Indian dialects and was an important moment in connecting the

idiom of the Vedas to modern India. 130 It also suggested to Burnouf
that language comparison could illuminate the history of religious
ideas, in this case Buddhism. Burnouf extended his case study of Pali to
a broader comparative analysis of Sanskrit and Farsi, which enabled him
to reconstruct the ancient language of the Zoroastrian books. His
Commentary on the Yanra (1835) asserted that Avestan was contempo-
rary to Vedic Sanskrit. Burnouf later deciphered the cuneiform inscrip-
tions of Persepolis based on knowledge of Avestan, an endeavor that
enabled the first readings of Assyrian since the inscriptions had been
translated into the language of Babylon.DI Since 1829 Eugene Burnouf
had been offering a course in comparative grammar to students of the
Ecole normale. In 1832 he ascended to the joint chairs vacated by
Chezy at the College de France and by Champollion at the Ecole. The
inaugural address Burnouf held at the College, "On the Language and
Literature of Sanskrit" (1832) proposed that "comparative analysis"
could connect the Rig Veda to the Zend-Avesta. 132 His famous course
on the Rig Veda acquainted students, such as Friedrich Max Muller
and, briefly in 1849, Ernest Renan, with a linguistic approach to com-
parative mythology.
At the time of his death, Burnouf had few followers in France it-
self, his legacy passing largely to German scholars and to the Geneva
Orientalist Adolphe Pictet. As he had been the sole representative of
comparative philology in France, the sense of discovery relayed by
Ernest Renan in the early 1840s is not surprising. Abbe Arthur-Marie
Le Hir had taught Renan Hebrew grammar at the Saint-Suplice semi-
nary, while he attended Etienne Quatremere's lectures at the College
de France. Le Hir was an accomplished Orientalist and introduced
Renan to the comparative study of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, a per-
spective he later extended to the entire Semitic family. m In 1845 a dis-
illusioned Renan descended the steps of Saint-Sup lice, never to return,
and dedicated his life to the "science of the future. "IM
Renan later claimed to have been "a philologist by instinct.,,135
But his success in the field was more the product of diligent research
than inspiration. By the time Renan won the Volney prize in linguistics
in 1847 for an essay on the Semitic language family, he had acquired a
thorough knowledge of German scholarship on Hebrew, reading the
likes of Gesenius, Ewald, Furst, and Klaproth. His essay On the Origin
of Language (1848) reviewed, for a French audience, developments

223
 CHAPTER 5

that had defined comparative philology from Herder and Humboldt to

Grimm and Bopp. Far more successfully than Burnouf, Renan publicly
celebrated the field as a "science of the human spirit." He styled him-
self as the spokesmen for German scholarship in France, earning his
reputation by applying Bopp's techniques to Hebrew and related
tongues. His General History and Comparative System of the Semitic
Languages (1845) charted the unique grammatical evolution of Ara-
maic, Hebrew, and Arabic from their origin to the conquest of the East
African coast. Whereas Bopp restricted himself to a sober survey of
Indo- European languages, however, Renan extrapolated from an "in-
ternal history" of the Semitic tongues to an analysis of "the Semitic
spirit,,136 and its religious and cultural proclivities.
Race was as malleable and ambigllolls a term for Renan as it was
for Friedrich Max Muller. Like his British colleague, he believed race
"held the secret to all events in the history of humanity." Unlike Max
Muller, however, Renan never assumed that race could be defined bio-
logically except at the start of history. The "enormous cross-breeding
of blood and ideas" made this impossible.L17 "Languages," he con-
cluded, "virtually supplanted race in distinguishing between human
groups, or, to put it another way, the meaning of the word 'race'
changed. Race became a matter of language, religion, laws, and cus-
toms more than of blood." BR
For this reason, Renan was more skeptical than Max Muller about
philology's claiming ethnological privileges. There are "linguistic
races," he argued, but these "have nothing to do with anthropological
race." Language, in his view, was a "very insufficient criterion for
race.,,139 The few moments when Renan did persist in attributing racial
qualities to linguistic groups, it was not in the context of distinguish-
ing Aryans from Semites. Both belonged to the "great perfectible
race." Biological race was only a factor separating this "civilized" pair
from Africans, Chinese, and Native Americans. When envisioned in
physical terms, in fact, Aryans and Semites were "two twins" who had
become "strangers." They had "no other sign of their parentage" than
"imperceptible analogies in language, some common ideas that recall
certain localities, and above all an air of family in the essential aptitudes
and external traits. ,,140 Renan concluded that the Semitic birthplace lay
just to the west of the Aryan homeland identified by Burnouf Both
tribes had come down from the heights of the Imaus mountain range
to live in the region stretching from Kashmir to the fertile crescent. 141

224
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

Language, however, revealed for Renan differences in the "intel-

lectual aptitudes and moral instincts" of Aryans and Semites. 142 He ar-
gued that comparative philology made possible "an embryology of the
human spirit," allowing scholars to return to the first formative mo-
ment in the emergence of a cultural group.14.' For Renan, language and
religion were both the unreflective, intuitive creations of national spirit.
Consistency in the evolution of language ensured that the initial idea
behind its formation remained binding through history. Nothing could
ever "be creatcd or added" to a language that did not conform to its
essence. 144 Language emerged "fully formed" at the start of a nation's
history "like Minerva from the head ofJupiter.,,145 Moreover, once cre-
ated, language constituted an "indestructible individuality," an "or-
ganic whole, endowed with its own life ... and laws. ,,146 This explained
why there was no evidence of "languages being able to correct them-
selves." The Semitic languages in particular, Renan insisted, exempli-
tIed the principle of internal organic consistency. Jacob Grimm consid-
ered a language healthy when it resisted the imposition of foreign
elements. Renan used the notion that language constituted "an inde-
structible individuality" to essentialize Aryan and Semitic races. 147
Much of the Origin was dedicated to refuting the large contin-
gent of German Orientalists who derived the most common Hebrew
roots from Proto- Indo- European forms. 148 Scholars such as Gesenius,
Ewald, and Julius Furst tried to prove that Hebrew roots, which were
disyllabic and composed of three radicals, had evolved from simpler
roots still found in Indo- European tongues. Although admitting the
ultimate possibility of shared descent, Renan insisted that the gram-
matical systems of the families were "profoundly distinct. ,,149 Nothing
authorized the "hypothesis of the Semitic languages' primitive mono-
syllabism"; ISO they could never have "attain[ ed] through any series of
developments the essential processes" characteristic of Aryan
IS1
tongues.
Desiring to isolate Semitic languages from Indo-European forms,
Renan dubbed them "languages of steel. ,,152 Comparative-historical
philology had taken so long to complete a Semitic grammar because
the tongues involved had "an interior life so inactive that they were in-
capable of revealing the organism ... and laws" of the family. These
tongues were "metallic," according to Renan, lacking the "tluidity"
and "aptitude for transformations" characteristic of the Indo- European
family. I s, Hebrew had ceased all historical development. This was appar-

225
 CHAPTER 5

ent in the materialist metaphors Hebrew evoked to describe the non-

physical world, a relic, Renan argued, of the earliest stage of linguistic
signification. Writing had likewise preserved the roots of the language
as if each radical were a "perfectly pure diamond." The convention of
omitting vowels and only "representing the skeleton of words" was
"excellent for the preservation of roots." From its origins to the pre-
sent "not one letter was lost." The "equal and unified" pronunciation
of Hebrew had also prevented accented syllables from swallowing or
· weak er ones ..154
absorb mg
Most decisive for the rigid structure of the Hebrew language was,
however, its grammar. The roots of words, Renan argued, were "unas-
sailable ... safe, more intact"; they were "a bedrock that no infiltration
can penetrate. ,,155 He explained that Hebrew "displayed a marked ten-
dency to amass expressions of relation outside the essential root." In his
view, agglutination was the dominant grammatical structure of He-
brew, "a steadfast procedure." As agglutination had been characteristic
of the most primitive first languages, he argued, its persistence testified
to the antiquity of Hebrew. Inflective languages, among which he in-
cluded Sanskrit, were, by contrast, "laden with inflections for express-
ing infinitely delicate references in thought. ,,156 Semitic sentences failed
to develop the "art of establishing reciprocity" among component
grammatical elements, never forming an organic unit. Inflecting lan-
guages enjoyed the advantage of building sentences that were "like a
body whose parts are connected. ,,157
The General History translated this account of linguistic differ-
ence into an exploration of the respective cultural contributions Aryans
and Semites had made to world history. Renan held language to be
"the requisite mold of a people's intellectual performance."ls8 Speakers
were "imprisoned once and for all in the grammar,,159 of their particu-
lar idiom. In his interpretation, the principle features of Semitic gram-
mar rendered speakers within the family incapable of science and phi-
losophy. Languages such as Hebrew had a "physical and sensual
character" in which "abstraction is unknown and metaphysics impossi-
ble.,,16u Semitic roots had evolved in "imitation of nature" so that the
ideas they embodied always tended toward realism, materiality, and the
sensuaL I61 Verb conjugation patterns likewise resulted in "inferior fac-
ulties of reasoning," while preserving "a vital taste for realism and a
great delicacy of sensations." Semitic languages supposedly lacked the
type of interior sentence construction that facilitated reason and sci-

226
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

ence; the art of subordinating lesser parts of a sentence, as well as an

organic combination of parts, was the privilege of Indo-European
tongues. In his view, philosophy had its only roots in India and Greece
among "a curious and vital race.,,162
Similarly, Renan held Semitic roots to be "absolutely incapable of
giving birth to mythology." In his view, the divination of nature's prim-
itive forces had been the source of all mythology. Flexible Indo- Euro-
pean verbs had embellished stories for a series of divine beings. Almost
all Aryan roots, Renan concluded, "contain ... a hidden god." By con-
trast' the "physical image" that dominated metaphors in Semitic lan-
guages held a power over religious thought, just as "the sun over the
flower"; their realism "always obscured abstract deductions." Semitic
speakers were only capable of thinking in terms that were "profoundly
monotheistic." Foreign mythologies, for example, had always been re-
duced into "dull historical accounts" by the literal bent of their lan-
guages. 163 Despite an abhorrence of metaphysics, Semitic peoples thus
had "a superior instinct" for monotheism, according to Renan. They
were possessed of "sure and steady intuitions" that had unveiled the
true divinity. Without "effort," "reflection[,] or reason" the Hebrew
people had mysteriously attained "the most purified form of religion
that antiquity knew. ,,164 The "desert is monotheistic," Renan con-
cluded, "sublime in its immense uniformity.,,165 Hebrew grammar en-
dowed its speakers with the ability to "simplifY the human spirit" and
establish a "most reasonable religion. ,,106
Renan deduced all further aspects of the Semitic character from
the primordial desire for monotheism. 167 In contrast to the ancient
Aryans, Semitic speakers had consistently sacrificed complexity, nuance,
and multiplicity for unity. This resulted in their becoming a "race in-
complete in its own simplicity." Following Christian Lassen's model in
the Indian Antiquities, Renan depicted Semitic speakers almost exclu-
sively with negative qualities. 168 He concluded that intolerance and im-
mobility had been a necessary condition of monotheism. Believing
God's power to explain everything, Semitic peoples had shown no cu-
riosity and no "freedom of thought, spirit of examination[,] or individ-
ual research." After introducing the world to monotheism they had ex-
ited history. The Semites lacked poetry and a creative imagination, a
sense for laughter, and all the fine arts except music, as well as an ad-
vanced civil life. The "great superiority of the Aryan race" rested in the
advantages of inflection. Indo-European languages displayed "a mar-

227
 CHAPTER 5

velous suppleness in how they express the most intimate relations

among things" in the inflection of nouns, in the varied tenses and
moods of their verbs, in composite words, and finally in the "delicacy
of their particles." 11>9
These arguments served Renan's purposes as a chronicler of
Christianity by diminishing the importance of Hebraic monotheism. As
Maurice Olender has argued, Renan wished to "Aryanize" the birth-
place of both civilization and religion by reconciling what he saw as the
dual ancestry of western Christianity.171) If Europe was Aryan in its lin-
guistic system, how could it be Semitic in faith? According to Renan
the Semitic spirit had produced monotheism by no fault of its own. The
truth of one God descended on the Hebrews without thought, reflec-
tion, or imagination. The rigid structures of language reinforced their
religious instincts, while preventing Semitic speakers from perfecting or
developing religion. According to Renan there had been "fundamen-
tally ... nothing Jewish about Jesus."I?1 "Christianity over time rid it-
self of nearly everything it took from the race," he argued, "so that
those who consider Christianity to be the Aryan religion par excellence
are in many respects correct." 172
Renan and Max Miiller may have eliminated biological race from
their considerations of linguistic difference. The sharp distinction they
drew between the language-based cultural proclivities of Aryans and
Semites reinforced, however, an equally pernicious attempt to write the
ancient Hebrews out of the religious and cultural history of Europe.
Inverting biblical narratives of God's chosen people had been a feature
of Orientalist rhetoric since Friedrich Schlegel equated the Germanic
homeland with an Eastern terrestrial paradise. Renan and Max Muller
contributed to this by essentializing the linguistic abilities of Aryans
and Semites. Comparative philology offered a paradigm for relating
grammar, thought, and cultural practices that was similar to racial the-
ory in its determinism. National tongues were an instinctive product of
an inner spirit or soul. They remained forever true to the principle
guiding their development through history and offered an all-encom-
passing explanation for the actions and beliefs of speakers.

THE LINGUISTIC ANTI-HUMANISM

OF AUGUST SCHLEICHER

Materialist concerns for how the body affected linguistic diversity did
eventually enter the German language sciences. The Jena comparativist

228
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

August Schleicher revived his field's traditional ties to the natural sci-
ences, transforming comparative philology into a discipline he called
Linguistik. Linguistics distinguished itself, in Schleicher's view, as the
Held that "took language as an object." Traditional philology, by con-
trast, approached language as a "means" to "penetrate the spiritual
essence and life of one or more nations." In his conception, language
lay beyond the "free will . . . and determination of the individual."
Thus the laws governing its development fell to the natural, not the his-
torical, sciences. For Schleicher, language was an internally sufficient
system that developed in complete independence of the needs or inten-
tions of its users. The goal of linguists was to document "the reign of
unchanging, natural laws" that the "will and caprice" of human beings
could not alter. J73 The only external explanation for linguistic change
could be found, he believed, in the physiology of linguistic organs.
Like many nineteenth-century linguists, Schleicher began his
studies as a theologian and a liberal. His father, a doctor, had taken part
in the founding of the first Burschenschaft in Jena before moving his
family to Meinigen, Thuringia. Schleicher himself was an active partic-
ipant in the gymnastics movement of the Turner, a vain effort to stave
off the tuberculosis which killed him at age forty-seven. As a theology
student, Schleicher resided in Tiibingen with the local Hegelians.
Switching there to philology, he studied Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, and
Farsi with Heinrich Ewald, who had recently been exiled for his defense
of Hannover's constitution. In 1843 Schleicher took up classical lan-
guages with Friedrich Ritschl and Friedrich Welcker in Bonn. There he
caught the attention of Prince Georg von Sachsen-Meiningen, who
funded two years of travel to Paris, London, and Vienna during the rev-
olutionary years 1848-50. During this time, Schleicher also served as a
foreign correspondent for the Augsbut;ger Allgemeine Zeitung and the
Kolnische Zeitung. His open support of the 1848 Revolutions con-
cerned the Hapsburg police enough to spy on him in Vienna and
Prague. 174 Schleicher's flrst academic post was as a classicist at the
Charles University of Prague. Here he stayed until 1858 when he was
appointed to the University of Jena.
Schleicher started his career collecting fairy tales and folklore in
Lithuania, emerging as the first expert on Slavic languages and situat-
ing them within the larger Indo- European family. As such, he exempli-
fies a new generation of comparative linguists whose specialty lay not in
Sanskrit or Indology. A concern for linguistic genealogies, partly in-

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 CHAPTER 5

spired by Ritschl's comparative reconstruction of manuscripts, drew

Schleicher deeper into the internal structures of languages themselves.
As Sebastiano Timpanaro has noted, there is a strong affinity between
the way nineteenth-century linguists classified languages and recon-
structed a lost mother tongue, and the method by which classicists clas-
sified manuscripts genealogically.]7; Schleicher's massive Compendium
of the Comparative Grammar of the Indogermanic Languages (1861)
synthesized and extended half a century of research into the family re-
latcd to Sanskrit. Its principle ambition was to reconstruct the original
Proto- Indo- European language with the same certainty as Karl Lach-
mann reconstructed the archetype of Lucretius. In Schleicher's view,
phonetic changes represented a decline from an original state of perfec-
tion and were thus analogous to textual corruptions. 176
Schleicher's understanding of linguistic history merged Hegelian
philosophy with Humboldt's typologies. In Tilbingen Schleicher con-
fronted Hegel's legacy and adopted the division he proposed between
prehistory and a later period in which humans became self-consciously
reflective. According to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History
(1837), neither the creation of language nor its perfection had been
"acts of a will becoming conscious of itself. ,,177 The elaborate, first na-
tional tongues appeared long before their speakers "attained historical
existence. ,,178 Language, moreover, became "poorer and less subtle"
with the advent of reason, will, freedom, and action. 179 Schleicher trans-
lated this perspective into a strict division between a "prehistoric pe-
riod," in which language developed to its fullest perfection, and a "his-
torical period" characterized by the "decline" of language. His
monograph On the Comparative History of Language (1848) explained
that "history and language formation" were "mutually exclusive activ-
ities within the human spirit. ,,180 "The more freely the spirit unfolds,"
Schleicher noted, "the more it extracts itself from language. That is
why sounds are worn away and the richness of forms is lost. ,,1"1
The prehistoric development of all languages followed Hum-
boldt's linguistic typology, according to Schleicher, with isolating, ag-
glutinating, and inflecting languages representing progressive stages of
intellectual maturity. Schleicher followed Hegel in assuming all lan-
guages embarked on the same historical trajectory toward structural
perfection. ls2 Not all completed the transition from isolation to inflec-
tion, however. Monosyllabic tongues, such as Chinese, had remained
mired in the first evolutionary stage of the prehistoric period. Aggluti-

230
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

nating languages, including Finnish and Turkish, had only achieved the
second level before entering a historical period of degeneration. lB.'
Schleicher's distinction between the prehistoric and historical pe-
riods oflanguage development did not discourage research into the un-
documented past. On the contrary, Schleicher was the first to recon-
struct a hypothetical ancestor for the Indo-European family. Earlier
philologists had assumed the existence of a mother tongue no longer
extant; Schleicher derived its likely forms from evidence surviving in its
descendents. 184 Comparative charts in his Compendium listed cognate
forms of various words and grammatical patterns as they appeared in
ditTerent languages. At the top of each column, he then added the most
likely reconstructed Urform. So confident was Schleicher in his recon-
structions that in 1868 he published a controversial fable ("The Sheep
and the Steed") in the supposed Indo-European Ursprache. 185 His stu-
dent Johannes Schmidt (1843-1901) exposed this primitive language
as a scientific fiction, suggesting that its components had actually orig-
inated at widely different periods. But later linguists applied the
methodology of reversing patterns of historical development to arrive
at a language's hypothetical origin more successfully.18b
The division of the Indo-European Ursprache into its known de-
scendents preoccupied Schleicher in the early 1850s, and he devised the
influential model of a "family tree" to document their separation. This
idea of a genealogical tree likely came from Ritschl, who was one of the
tirst to study the genealogy of a manuscript tradition in depth.IB? "The
first Divisions of the Indo-Germanic Urvotk" (1853) visually repre-
sented the descent of the language family in the torm of a Stammbaum.
This model was updated twice, once in 1860 and then in 1863 follow-
ing Schleicher's encounter with the genealogical chart Charles Darwin
presented in The Origin of Species (1859). The antiquity of a given lin-
guistic group's departure from the homeland could be measured based
on how far to the east or west it had progressed. 1"8
Linguistic images, such as Schleicher's family tree, preceded and
intluenced the pattern of branching genealogical descent that Darwin
and other natural scientists adopted in the 1860s.1 89 Philologists wel-
comed the model as well, but with greater reservation. The family tree
most effectively depicts the diffusion of languages over distances that
completely sever speakers from each other geographically, as in the evo-
lution of South African Afrikaans from Dutch. In most cases the divi-
sion of languages is a gradual process. Yet Schleicher's diagram sug-

231
 CHAPTER 5

B. ;5'tammbaunl/yon IS61 (1869)

Two of the genealogical trees by which August Schleicher depicted the

branching descent of Indo- European languages from a single source .

gested that the branching of tongues transpired within a short time

90
span and that once separate, no further influences were possible.1 Jo-
hannes Schmidt, added a corrective to the family tree in the form of a
"wave theory" of linguistic diffusion, proposing in 1872 that sound
changes in the Indo-European languages had spread over geographic
areas. This eased the abrupt splits in Schleicher's model and indicated
how certain languages or dialects might have borrowed neighboring at-
tributes without being direct descendents. 191 Schmidt's own student
Paul Kretschmer increasingly emphasized the horizontal transmission
of linguistic facts so that linguistic kinship appeared to be acquired by
means 0 f contact not by 10 . h·
entance. 192
Schleicher's exclusion of human influence from the tlrst period of
language development reinforced its perceived autonomy. Europe)s
Languages in Systematic Overview (1850) set language apart from
speakers as an autonomous natural organism. National tongues went
through periods of growth, maturity, and decline independently of the
will and consciousness of speakers. "Languages are organisms of na-

232
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

ture," Schleicher stated, "They have never been directed by the will of
man; they rose, and developed themselves according to defInite laws;
they grew old and died out. ,,193 Even within the historical period, Schle-
icher concluded, the process of language degeneration "lies ... equally
beyond the free determination of will." The regularity of "erosion"
across the spectrum of national tongues could only be explained by the
"uniform constitution" of human "speech organs." The sole influence
speakers had on language was in the area of syntax and stylistics. 1~4
Many German linguists accepted Schleicher's aligning their field
with the natural sciences while qualifYing his treatment of language as
an autonomous organism. Friedrich Max Muller, for example, main-
tained that linguistics was a physical science comparable to geology. His
first lecture in the Science of Language (1861) supported Schleicher's
detaching the field from the historical sciences based on the claim that
it was "not in the power of man" to produce or prevent language
change. 195 At the same time, Max Muller considered it "sheer mythol-
ogy" to speak oflanguage "as a thing by itself, as living a life of its own,
as growing to maturity, producing offspring, and dying away." The
human soul was the "soil" without which a language did not grow.
What he termed the "natural growth of language" was determined by
two forces: phonetic decay and dialectic regeneration. Neither of these
was "under the control of man," nor "produced by an inward principle
of growth."I96
In the 1860s Schleicher tied language change more consistently
to the physiology of speakers' bodies. An encounter with Darwinian
theory reinforced his turn to materialism. Schleicher received a German
translation of The Origins of Species in 1863 from the young Ernst
Haeckel (1834-62), then an associate professor of zoology at the
Friedrich Schiller University ofJena. He responded with a letter dedi-
cated to Haeckel that evaluated "Darwinism Tested by the Science of
Language" (1863). Schleicher found evidence in Darwin's work that
biology and linguistics were converging. This implied, on the one
hand, that Darwinian notions of descent and the struggle for existence
applied to languages and language groups. According to Schleicher,
"Arian" tongues were "the conquerors in the struggle for existence."
Competition in the "field of human speech" allowed for "compara-
tively few ta.vored races"; they had "already supplanted or dethroned
numerous other idioms," causing the "extinction of a vast multi-
tude.,,197 On the other hand, Schleicher believed evolutionary biology

233
 CHAPTER 5

needed the support of linguistics. Only the "glossologist" could con-

firm the evolutionary patterns of the natural world, possessing in writ-
ing more positive proofs for branching descent and transmutation. 198
Schleicher's acceptance of Darwinism was more threatening to
linguists than the call to natural science. Max Muller feared Schleicher
erased the distinction language drew between human and animal. The
popularity of the Indologist's public lectures derived from his ability to
muster philology in the fight against Darwinism. 199 He blamed Britons'
uncritical acceptance of Darwin on their ignorance of Kantian philoso-
phy. Kant had proclaimed the categories of thought to be prior to ex-
perience; reason therefore could not have evolved from man's animal
faculties. 20o The connection between language and conceptual thought
disproved for Max Muller any evolutionary continuity between people
and animals. "The one great barrier between the brute and man," he
asserted, "is Language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a
word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it."zol
Schleicher himself, however, cited the physiology of speakers as
grounds for retaining language as the "prime criterion" in the scientific
classification of human communities. Language, he insisted, was
"something with a material existence"; speech had "a material, bodily
basis." Schleicher concluded in 1865 that "language is the audible
symptom of the brain and speech organs, with nerves, bones, muscles,
etc." Different types of lungs, noses, larynxes, throats, and oral cavities
produced particular sounds. He admitted that a "comparative investi-
gation of the speech organs of linguistically diverse peoples" had not
yet begun. It was likely, however, that language diversity resulted from
"minimal differences in the character of the brain and the speech or-
gans."202 Comparative linguistics was therefore far more effective than
physical anthropology in ordering the world's peoples. "How incon-
stant are such matters as cranial shape and other racial traits!" Schle-
icher exclaimed. Far more important were the "no less material, though
infinitely finer, bodily characteristic, of which the symptom is lan-
guage."203 Language study could make more precise physical distinc-
tions within the same race, while showing the ties between racial
groups who shared similar tongues.
For Schleicher race alone was not an adequate concept for classi-
£)ring human beings. Yet the attempt to explain language diversity with
direct reference to racial categories found adherents among Mricanists

234
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

in the late nineteenth century. As Sara Pugach has illustrated, the

African linguist Carl Meinhof (1857-1944) derived the unfamiliar
sounds of African tongues from the racialized bodies of their speakers.
The first professor of African Languages at the Colonial Institute of
Hamburg, Meinhof applied the principles ofIndo-European linguistics
to a comparative grammar of Bantu tongues in 1906, having earlier
made an effort to reconstruct the likely vocabulary of Ur-Bantu. 204 At
his pioneering phonetics laboratory in Hamburg, Meinhof insisted that
students first observe African subjects speaking and absorb their pro-
nunciation visually before learning languages aurally. African bodies
were a chief preoccupation of linguistic research. 20s Racial assumptions
likewise underlay Meinhof's division of African languages into Bantu,
Hamitic, and Sudanic families, as they did his affirmation of the noto-
rious Hamitic hypothesis. By this view, the cursed descendents of Ham
entered northern Africa as a relatively light-skinned conquering tribe
closely related to speakers of Semitic languages and eventually inter-
mixed with local black natives assumed to be of lesser cultural and racial
value. 206 Meinhof's classification of African languages had a direct im-
pact on the state ethnologists who devised the apartheid-era homelands
policy for the Republic of South Africa. 207
Schleicher's model of language evolving independently of speak-
ers' willful control ultimately proved inadequate in explaining linguis-
tic change over time. Scholars outside of Germany criticized Schle-
icher's historicism and his insistence that the moment of a language's
creation predetermined its subsequent evolution. The American
William Dwight Whitney (1827-94) and the French linguist Michel
Breal (1832-1915) also rejected his radical separation oflanguages and
speakers. Schleicher's model of the natural organism verged on a cari-
cature, Whitney suggested. In his view, language was the cultural and
historical product of people's action, a voluntary institution, rather
than an autonomous natural being subject to set laws. For Whitney and
Breal, the problem of language change could only be solved by ceasing
to regard language as an autonomous entity that lived independently of
its users. As will be seen in chapter 6, they insisted on the importance
of a speaker's free will, redefining language as a social institution and
an instrument of communication and interaction. The will, needs, and
intention of the speaker were the true forces behind language change,
not the inner principle governing the linguistic organism.

235
 CHAPTER 5

NEOGRAMMARJANS AND THE PROBLEM

OF HISTORICAL AGENCY

Linguists in Germany recognized this crisis of historical agency but in-

stead attributed language change to unconscious psychological mecha-
nisms. The school of Neogrammarians that coalesced in Leipzig in the
1870s assumed language evolved independently of the conscious will
and intention of human communities. Its members eliminated the
Volksgeist as an agent of historical change and restricted themselves to a
positivistic "study of forms." The circle's chief theorists included two
comparativists, the Heidelberg professor Hermann Osthoff (1847-
1909) and his Leipzig colleague Karl Brugman (1849-1919), as well as
the Germanist Hermann Paul (1846-1921). These linguists docu-
mented how national tongues evolved, conducting detailed, even
atomistic, investigations of grammatical change over time. Their expla-
nations for this change eventually drew attention to structuralist aspects
of language production, but with specific attention to the physical
mechanisms of the body.
In the 1878 text known as the Neogrammarian manifesto, Os-
thoff and Brugman urged linguists to cease regarding language as
"something that exists outside and above the individual and lives a life
of its own." Language had "its true existence only in the individual,"
and "all changes in the life of language can only ensue from individual
speakers. ,,208 Linguists thus had to conduct research on "the speaking
person" in order to understand how "human language lives and pro-
gresses." Nevertheless, Osthoff and Brugman had a restricted notion of
the impact speakers had on language. The pair did not consider the
communicative or pragmatic aspects of the speech act. In their view, the
physics of the "human mechanism for speech" propelled language evo-
lution. This mechanism had "a dual front"; it was driven by both the
"psychic" and "corporal" functions of the body. 209
This focus did not obviate the traditionally historical focus of Ger-
man linguistics. The strength of the Neogrammarian reputation rests
on the precision with which the school identified exception less laws
governing sound change through time. "All sound change," Osthoff
and Brugman argued, "occurs according to exceptionless laws ... the
direction of sound change is ... always the same among all members
of a linguistic community. ,,210 Karl Verner (1846-96) inspired this claim
when he eliminated one year earlier the exceptions plaguing Grimm's

236
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

Law on the Germanic sound shifts. Verner demonstrated that the posi-
tion of the accent in Indo-European words was responsible for the
seemingly irregular behavior of the spirants resulting from the first Ger-
manic sound shift; whether the spirant remained voiceless or became
voiced was predictable. 211
However, Osthoff and Brugman did urge linguists not to endow
the origins of a language with the formative powers. Neogrammarians
preferred to research the "most recent phases" of the Indo-European
languages, as well as the "living vernaculars." Only this would clear the
methodological "fog" that a focus on archaic origins had produced. To
understand historical change, the pair insisted, linguists must "step out
of the murky hypothetical atmosphere of the workshop on which the
base Indo-Germanic forms are forged and into the clear air of tangible
reality and the present.,,212 They criticized previous comparativists, in-
cluding Schleicher, for concentrating on the "purely hypothetical" re-
construction of the Indo-European "base forms." The focus on origins
and linguistic prehistory was an inadequate basis for achieving "a cor-
rect notion of the way language develops. ,,213 Texts, such as Wilhelm
Scherer's On the History of the German Language (1868) likewise
shifted scholars' attention from the written letter to the spoken word.
Phonetics and dialectology were gateways to what the Neogrammari-
ans termed the physiology of sound.
For Neogrammarians, the regularity of sound change derived
from the consistency of speakers' physical and psychological responses
to language. How speakers "appropriated the language inherited from
their ancestors," as well as how consciousness "reproduced and modi-
fied sound images" were "essentially the same at all times.,,214 This
made it possible, according to Osthoff and Brugman, to investigate
barely documented periods oflinguistic history. The "principle of anal-
ogy" could be used to project patterns oflinguistic change backward in
time. There was no reason to assume that the "physical activities" peo-
ple engaged in when "adopting, reproducing, and gradually changing"
inherited forms was "in past centuries substantially different" than in
the present. 2l5 In 1880 the Neogrammarian Hermann Paul conceded
that the expectation of sOllnd laws being exception less could only be a
"working hypothesis." Osthoff and Brugman's claim had to be rela-
tivized. Nevertheless, the school retained the focus on sound laws as
the only "pillars" that could provide the field of linguistics with "solid
ground under foot.,,216

237
 CHAPTER 5

Despite the theoretical emphasis on reintroducing the speaker to

considerations of sound change, Neogrammarians still treated language
as if it were an autonomous entity with a historical existence. "The
sound laws of language," Hermann Osthoff asserted, "operate nearly
blind, with the blind necessity of nature.,,217 In practice, the focus
Neogrammarians placed on external forms tended to isolate individuals
from the process of language change. 218 Osthoff's essay "The Physio-
logical and Psychological Moment in the Building of Linguistic Forms"
(1879) argued that sound change "occurs unbeknownst to the speaker,
thus purely mechanically" without "human desire or disinterest. ,,219
Physiologically, speakers were propelled by "the unconscious desire to
spare energy" to substitute sounds that were "less energetic" and de-
manded "less effort" from linguistic organs. 220 Physical affinities among
the speakers of a given language ensured that bodily organs reacted in
a similar fashion; one individual substitution could also spark a collec-
tive transformation through "imitation." Osthoff likewise attributed
linguistic diversity and the progressive diffusion of language families to
"changes in the linguistic organs." The "differing climate of the moun-
tains'" he explained "creates different lungs, chests, larynxes in moun-
tain dwellers, that of the plains creates the same organs differently
among inhabitants of the valleys. ,,221
The psychological factors shaping the laws of sound change were
also "unconscious" and transpired at the level of the collective, rather
than the individual. Osthoff borrowed from the work of the psycholo-
gist Johann Friedrich Herbart ( 1776-1841) to explain a process of "as-
sociation creation" in language. Any sound changes that appeared ran-
dom or irregular were actually the product of the "psychological
drives" that transformed the spoken word. Concepts were "brought
into unconscious connection . . . their forms influenced and their
sounds transformed" by means of psychologically associated ideas. 222
Here, too, human will and desire had little control over the way speak-
ers contributed to the historical evolution of language. Language
change occurred by means of automatic physical and mental responses.
The emphasis the Neogrammarians placed on psychology and the
role of the speaker eventually caused a crisis of historicism within Ger-
man linguistics. Osthoff, Brugman, and their Leipzig colleagues sought
to identifY sources of sound change over time. But the explanatory
mechanisms they chose to replace mystical forces such as the Volksgeist
had a universalizing dimension to them. As Hermann Paul detailed in

238
 COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

his Principles of the History of Language (1880), the laws of psychology

remained constant over time. The linguist therefore had to research the
"general conditions for the life of a historically developing object."m
Paul, as will be seen, contributed to the new discipline of general lin-
guistics that emerged in the late nineteenth century, discussing the con-
ditions that made language possible. The always present concern he
and other Neogrammarians showed for the synchronic dimensions of
language study makes it less surprising that Ferdinand de Saussure, the
founder of modern structuralism, emerged from within their ranks.
The next chapter traces a growing reaction against the strict historicism
of German language studies, both abroad and among those who ap-
plied psychology to comparative linguistics. It likewise shows how the
turn to psychology reanimated old debates concerning the relationship
between language and mental structures. The late eighteenth-century
aftinity between philosophy and language study was reborn, as a psy-
chological approach to language again raised the problem of linguistic
signification.

239
 G

Spea~ers and Subjectivitu

Toward aCrisis of ~inguistic Historicism, 1850-1900

T he University of Leipzig holds a remarkable, yet often unrecognized

place in the history of twentieth-century French philosophy. Two of
the theorists most responsible for launching a "linguistic turn" in the
human sciences trained in the philosophical faculty of the Saxon capi-
tal. Seven years after Friedrich Nietzsche left the city for Basel in 1869,
Ferdinand de Saussure began his university studies there. The pair
never crossed paths in Leipzig and in any event frequented different de-
partments, classical philology and comparative linguistics respectively.
Yet they shared an important mentor in Georg Curtius, the adventur-
ous classicist who acquainted Greek scholars with comparative philo-
logical techniques. Nietzsche followed Curti us's pleas to enhance clas-
sical studies by adopting the philosophical perspective and scientific
rigor of linguistics. Himself a disciple of Friedrich Ritschl, Curtius in-
troduced Nietzsche to an extensive literature in comparative philology
and language theory. Saussure, in turn, entered the University of
Leipzig after reading Curtius's Principles of Greek Etymology (1858).
Once there, he "followed regularly the course of Curti us, " I joining his
Grammatical Society along with members of the local school of
Neogrammarians.
The near of meeting of the prominent tIn-de-siecle scholars rivals
any number of missed historical encounters. One can only imagine the

241
 CHAPTER 6

list of eager flies on the wall. Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and
other structuralists and poststructuralists built upon the way Nietzsche
and Saussure used language to critique knowledge, subjectivity, and
forms of social interaction. Could the talented students have enter-
tained these authors so early in their careers? A rising star in classical
philology, Nietzsche had yet to repudiate a tradition that many schol-
ars have seen as a mere obstacle on the path to philosophy. A prodigy
among the Neogrammarians, Saussure had recently published a highly
regarded, radically historical study that reconstructed the vowel system
of Proto-Indo-European. Neither scholar had yet assumed the guise
most familiar to the twentieth century. Is the Leipzig connection purely
coincidental? To what extent did the encounter with comparative Ger-
man philology propel Nietzsche and Saussure on their respective intel-
lectual trajectories?
This chapter situates the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-
1900) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) at the culmination of
a century of reflecting on the autonomous powers of language. Their
vision of words constructing the very subjects that spoke them repre-
sents an extension of earlier concerns for how national tongues shaped
culture and community. Comparativists once attributed an authorita-
tive role to origins and an inner principle of growth when considering
how language shaped thought and identity. Both Nietzsche and Saus-
sure challenged the origin paradigm, while subjecting speakers to a new
set of linguistic demands. Their respective theories of language re-
sponded to a crisis of historicism that a predominance of organic
metaphors had spawned among German-trained scholars. Late nine-
teenth-century linguists had difficulty explaining sound change over
time, especially after August Schleicher detached language from human
communities and discounted the illusive Volksgeist as a motor oflinguis-
tic change. Seeking other causes behind the evolution of national
tongues, his successors reintroduced speakers and drew on the princi-
ples of psychology to explain the regularity of linguistic development.
This shift encouraged analysis of the unconscious desires and drives
that influenced language production. It also favored general theories of
language use and the systematic description of how an idiom operates
at a given time regardless of its origins and past history.
The chapter opens with the broader political context in which
speculative psychology entered the field of linguistics, suggesting that a
reconsideration of speakers did not resurrect faith in their agency and

242
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

cogmtlve authority. The linguists Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903) and

Heymann Steinthal (1823-99) applied the principles of collective psy-
chology to clarify the relationship between language and national spirit
in the years surrounding the Reichsgriindung. Loyal Prussians and Ger-
man Jews, this team minimized the importance of origins in national-
ity, refuting a view increasingly popular in the German Empire that a
shared language implied joint ethnic descent. Within the context of
VOikerpsychologie, or comparative research on the "psychology of peo-
ples," Steinthal and Lazarus defined the nation as a discursive commu-
nity united by a self-conscious process of identification. Steinthal, in
particular, insisted that national tongues had their inception in instinc-
tuallife and the unconscious. This dehistoricized the origin oflanguage
question and drew attention to general laws oflanguage operation. He
likewise applied psychology to Wilhelm von Humboldt's consideration
of the impact language had on thought, rekindling the linguistic cri-
tique of metaphysics that J. G. Hamann and J. G. Herder had initiated
in the late eighteenth century.
Nietzsche and Saussure developed the implications German lin-
guists drew from the encounter with psychology and the effort to rein-
tegrate the speaker into considerations of language. The role of in-
stincts and aesthetic drives in the formation of words undermined for
Nietzsche the pretensions conceptual thought made to objective truth.
He critically reappropriated the genealogical method to unveil what he
perceived as the unstable linguistic foundations of rational science and
theology. By the mid-1880s Nietzsche came to regard the cognitive
subject itself as a linguistic fiction-a grammatical convention that had
through history assumed untoward philosophical significance. Saus-
sure's transition from historical to synchronic linguistics likewise built
upon late nineteenth-century precedents. The Neogrammarian Her-
mann Paul and other critics within the German philological tradition
asserted the need to investigate language states as if frozen in time.
Saussure drew on their perspective, but without heeding their plea to
reinvest speakers with semiotic agency. Both Saussure and Nietzsche
questioned on the basis of language whether human subjects possessed
a sovereign consciousness and could claim privileged knowledge of the
worlds they inhabited. Their respective conceptions of language rede-
fined human subjectivity and the epistemological capabilities of speak-
ers. Yet Nietzsche's critical appropriation of genealogy and the origin
motif found little immediate resonance in Germany. The turn toward

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 CHAPTER 6

structuralism was also of limited scope and of relatively short duration.

Nietzsche and Saussure were language scholars untypical of their age
and only found a substantial following outside of Germany in the twen-
tieth century.

VOLKERPSYCHOLOGIE AND THE NATION:

MORITZ LAZARUS

A speculative form of collective psychology entered the language sci-

ences within the broader nationalist project of Volkerpsychologie that two
Jewish intellectuals, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, organized
following the failed Revolutions of 1848-49. As linguists, this pair be-
lieved themselves well equipped to unravel the cultural significance of
language as the chief constituent and ohjective manifestation of the
Volksgeist. The application of psychology, in their view, aided in explain-
ing the elusive ebb and flow of the German national consciousness. The
ambition to unite the study of language, nationality, and collective psy-
chology inspired Lazarus and Steinthal's Zeitschrift fur Vijlkerpsychologie
und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Comparative Psychology and Lin-
guistics), which began in 1860. The publication branched beyond the
field of linguistics proper to include essays on mythology, religion, art,
literature, law, statistics, trade practices, and domestic life. Steinthal, in
particular, devoted attention to mythology as an authentic expression of
the national spirit, engaging in a bitter dispute on the respective merits
of Hebrew monotheism and "Aryan" polytheism in the 1860s. 2 The
journal touched a range of thinkers from Wilhelm Dilthey to Sigmund
Freud, Thomas Mann, and Franz Boas. 3 The experimental psychologist
Wilhelm Wundt most directly carried on the tradition of Vijlkerpsycholo-
gie, tracing in a ten-part work of that name the correspondence between
language and human mental processes at different stages in history.4
Many language scholars, such as Hermann Paul, shunned the journal's
focus on collective psychology, however. Lazarus and Steinthal's ideal-
ism and their speculative methods ran counter to the model of natural
science that more mainstream linguists, such as August Schleicher, ad-
vocated.
Lazarus and Steinthal were moderate liberals who supported a
Pruss ian solution to German unification and never questioned the ulti-
mate authority of the state. 5 However, their discursive model of the lin-
guistic community departed from the standard of the time in rejecting
the allure of formative origins. Lazarus and Steinthal generally assumed

244
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

nationality emerged in a process of subjective identification; through

language the individual developed a self-conscious awareness of partic-
ipating in a larger community. This notion detached nationhood from
ethnicity, but soon represented a last gasp of moderation in a new era
of Realpolitik and radical nationalism. Especially after German unifica-
tion, many conservative nationalists favored an increasingly radical
volkisch vision of a quasi-racial linguistic community. This indicates how
substantially the strand of linguistic thought that culminated in a repu-
diation of origins departed from the more mainstream essentialist and
racialist notion of authentic German national culture that infused the
various national philologies and public opinion.
Prussia had initially separated citizenship rights from language
and cultural heritage following its reconstitution as a state after the
Napoleonic occupation. As Friedrich Wilhelm III declared to his Pol-
ish provinces in 1815, "You shall be inregrated inro my kingdom with-
out having to disavow your nationality.... Your language shall be used
alongside German in all public proceedings.,,6 A law from 1817 pro-
tected the use of both German and Polish in the courts; in 1842 the
state likewise guaranreed that children of linguistic minorities would re-
ceive instruction in their mother tongue. All schools were to teach Ger-
man, but this expectation arose from pragmatic considerations of how
best to facilitate communication and the business of administration. A
similar policy of linguistic toleration applied to Danish-speaking areas
of the kingdom following Prussia's incorporation of the Duchy of
Schleswig. Even nationalists assembling at the Frankfurt Parliament in
1848-49 voiced almost universal opposition to the idea of forced Ger-
manization or even discrimination against other language groups or na-
tionalities; the nation-state they imagined was not limited to an exclu-
sive community of German speakers. The goals of political integration
and inspiring loyalty to the state trumped more idealistic visions of Ger-
man cultural unity.7
As a child, Lazarus experienced the delicate balance of language,
culture, and national loyalty that characterized the small towns of
Posen in East Prussia. He was born into a family of rabbis, his home-
town of Filehne inhabited by a third each of Polish Catholics, German
Protestants, and Jews. The young Lazarus noticed that the confessional
groups "were of differenr descent and spoke different languages" and
found himself observing "national developments in the cultural diver-
sity of all forms of life." This marked for him the "personal beginnings

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 CHAPTER 6

of Volkerpsychologie," while suggesting that German statehood must in-

corporate a diversity of ethnic backgrounds." Lazarus received a local
Talmudic education before entering the gymnasium at Braunschweig
where his advisor, a student of the psychologist Johann Friedrich
Herbart (1776-1841), encouraged him to study languages in Berlin.
Mter completing his doctorate, Lazarus obtained a professorship in
comparative psychology in the Swiss city of Bern. He quickly rose to
the post of dean and then rector of the university, supporting Steinthal
on the proceeds. He returned to Berlin later in his career, helping to
found the Hochschule fur Wissenschaft des Judentums. After 1880 he
was increasingly active in Judaic studies, eventually leaving the journal
he founded with Steinthal to write The Ethics ofJudaism (1898-99).
While a doctoral student, Lazarus published a defense titled Prus-
sia's Moral Privileges in Germany (1850) that made manifest the polit-
ical ambitions behind VOlkerpsychologie. Prussia was the "true pillar and
guardian" of the German national spirit, Lazarus argued. 9 Following
Hegel, he honored the state as an ethical forum; in his view, individu-
als became moral through their identification with and assimilation into
the state. The state's ethical responsibilities included, in turn, "execut-
ing the national idea. ,,10 German unification depended on the strength
of "the spiritual and moral power that permeates a Volk," and only
Prussia, in his view, possessed the "intelligence" and cultural fortitude
necessary to assert its "inner spiritual power. "II In a letter to T. A.
Kruger, Lazarus stated his intention "to pursue ... these thoughts fur-
ther ... academically and carry them out in a more scholarly venue.,,12
The Zeitschrift fur VOlkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft provided
"politics with a scientific foundation," developing a theory of the na-
tional spirit that the state could theoretically harness and direct. 13
Psychology, a field Lazarus dubbed the "science of Spirit," was, in
his view, best suited to clarifY the laws by which "the inner spirituality
or ideal activity of a people" developed. " He and Steinthal initially
imagined the Volksgeist as pure idea or a transcendent subject with its
own creative powers. Gradually, however, the journal came to regard
spirit as substance, looking at its concrete manifestations. The dual na-
ture of the Volksgeist justified Lazarus's dividing the project of VOlk-
erpsychologie into two spheres of investigation. The "psychology of na-
tional history" devised a general theory that explained how the
Volksgeist operated. This project had structuralist ambitions, seeking the
universal "psychological laws" that governed sociability and intersub-

246
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

jective experience across history. "Psychological ethnology," by con-

trast, investigated actually existing national spirits with the descriptive,
particularistic tools of anthropology and history. I; Despite this inten-
tion, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), who met Lazarus and Steinthal in
Berlin, rightly chastised the project's inhospitality to empirical research.
Comparative psychology proceeded largely as a philosophy of history,
rather than as an investigation of concrete acts. I!>
Lazarus and Steinthal attributed to language scholars "the most
important role" in Volkerpsychologie. Language was, on the one hand,
the objective manifestation of the national spirit and thus an important
topic for empirical research. One could, for example, scrutinize vocab-
ulary to determine the "size of the conceptual circle" belonging to a
nation or to discover whether a people valued material objects, religion,
emotion, or abstract thought. l ? On the other hand, national tongues
supposedly produced "an instinctive worldview and logic" that unified
communities. 18 They acted as an "adhesive" solidifYing the intersubjec-
tive life of a nation. 19 In Stein thaI's view, language enabled "the apper-
ception of one person through another." When engaging in a conver-
sation, for example, language enabled speakers of the same tongue to
bare their souls and become "united in spirit." Members of a linguistic
community "reciprocally take each other into themselves so that they
together form a nation.,,20 Using language as an instrument of commu-
nication and sociability helped create the sense of self-consciousness in-
volved in being part of a nation.
The nation that emerged from this understanding uf language
was a voluntary discursive community whose members inhabited a
shared spiritual realm. The mere inheritance of a shared mother tongue
was not sufficient to form a nation. Lazarus realized the difficulty of
distinguishing national languages from dialects or accounting for the
persistence of vernacular speech and slang in a standardized idiom. 21
Therefore only "a mass of people who regard themselves as a Volk"
constituted a nation;22 the nation existed "merely in the subjective view
of [its] members. ,,2.1 "The individual himself determines his nationality
in a subjective manner"; Lazarus explained, "he reckons himself part
of a nation. ,,24 Lazarus and Stein thai virtually eliminated the impor-
tance of common descent and biological relation in the linguistic def-
inition of nationality. "The branches of a nation do not all grow from
one trunk," Lazarus asserted. ,,25 Physical characteristics only condi-
tioned a nation to the extent that they shaped subjective feelings of

247
 CHAPTER 6

identification. The potato, for example, was now a symbol of Irish na-
tionality, but there was no causal relationship between nutrition it pro-
vided and the Irish national spirit. 26
This perspective enabled Lazarus and Steinthal to express their
loyalty as German nationals while still preserving a self-consciously Jew-
ish identity. In a lecture titled "What Is Natiunal?" held before the
Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums in December 1880,
Lazarus specitlcally rejected "all blood and racial theory" as "the over-
flow of a grossly sensual materialism. ,,27 His reflections were provoked
by the anti-Semitic speeches the Prussian court preacher Alfred Stocker
held the same year to draw workers away from social democracy.
Lazarus countered that nationality consisted solely in the subjective
identification an individual felt for a community; it was facilitated by
language, but also through education, art, law, and statecraft.
Emphasizing the discursive function of the national tongue res-
onated with the conception of language once favored by the dynastic
states of central Europe. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies, language had been of concern to officials only to the extent that
vernaculars presented a potential barrier to effective administration.
However, statisticians like Richard Bockh (1824-1907), who argued in
Lazarus and Steinthal's journal for the necessity of the state's surveying
linguistic practices, were instrumental in creating a new ufficial correla-
tion between language and nationality in Prussia. Starting in 1817 and
1828 Prussia began gathering statistics in its eastern provinces to deter-
mine how many people could not use German in public venues and re-
ligious services. 28 The grandson of the classicist August Boeckh assisted
in evaluating the findings of Prussia's first comprehensive linguistic sur-
vey in 1861, serving as the director of Berlin's statistical office from
1875 to 1902.
Bockh's essay "The Statistical Importance of the Volkssprache as a
Mark of Nationality" (1866) argued that the mother tongue was "the
true criterion of nationality. ,,29 In his view, a shared mother tongue fos-
tered the common consciousness which united members of the nation;
it also provided a necessary instrument of communication. Bockh re-
jected a wide array of factors as inconclusive evidence of national affili-
ation. These included political loyalties, geographical location, and tra-
ditions of law, dress, customs, food, domestic life, as well as intellectual
and cultural achievements. "Physique" and "signs of descent" were also
irrelevant, in his view. Language alone was the "true pillar of national-

248
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

ity.,,30 From Bockh's perspective, Jews were thus full members of the
German nation, Yiddish being a German dialect comparable to Saxon
or Frisian."
Censuses of the type Bockh recommended encouraged a linguis-
tic definition of nationhood among a wide swath of Prussian citizens.
The modern administrative state was, as Eric Hobsbawn suggests, com-
plicit in fostering popular nationalism and suggesting the viability of
language as a political instrument:12 By 1866, the year of the decisive
Prussian victory over Austria, increased exposure to standardized Ger-
man in schools and an expansion of the literary market had familiarized
the educated middle class and the petit bourgeoisie with the notion of
a national language. As Claus Ahlzweig writes, a series of lectures,
brochures, and popular publications indicate that broad segments of
the population had embraced a nationalist ideology of the mother
tongue by the time of German unification in 1871. 33 As this occurred,
the linguistic definition of German nationhood ceased to bc the
purview of a progressive and liberal opposition and was drawn into a
broader-based conservative nationalism.
Under Otto von Bismarck, the German Empire initially refrained
from defining nationhood in ethnocultural terms, fearing that this
might jeopardize the integrity of Germany's fragile borders. The indi-
vidual states retained purview over linguistic matters. 34 Nevertheless,
Prussia itself did steer the politics of language in its eastern provinces.
As part of the KulturkampJ, Bismarck imposed the first restrictions on
the use of Polish. In 1872-73 German became the compulsory lan-
guage of instruction for all subjects in elementary schools in Upper
Silesia and West Prussia, and for all subjects except religion in Posnan.
He declared German the sole language of public life in 1876. These
measures did not aim at Germanizing Poles but at winning over the
loyalty of peasants and the emerging Polish middle class by weakening
the influence of the nobility and clergy.35 In 1908 a new imperial law
concerning societies (Reichsvereinsgesetz) made German the required
language of all assemblies and associations, as an attempt to regulate
and censor nationalists in the east. Alsace- Lorraine received special ex-
emption to permit French as an official second language of assemblies
in its districts. 36
By the Wilhelmine period, language had emerged as a driving
force in the type of radical (viilkisch) nationalism that brought the state
closer to an expansionist and ethnocultural definition of nationhood. As

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 CHAPTER 6
Roger Chickering has shown, the German Language Association,
founded in 1885 by Hermann Riegel, resembled other patriotic soci-
eties of the period, including the Pan-German League and the German
Colonial Society.37 Attracting a membership of 34,280 by 1914, the or-
ganization dedicated itself to "strengthening the general national con-
sciousness of the German people, ,,38 using its journal and popular
Verdeutschungsbucher (Germanizing books) to help "purifY" the mother
tongue. The association won the support of powerful agencies, success-
fully convincing ministries, local government offices, and professional
associations to rid their vocabulary of Anglicisms. At stake, Chickering
suggests, was the question of whose language would symbolize, express,
mediate, and constitute the German national experience. The -associa-
tion drew from the ranks of the educated Protestant middle class, pub-
lic employees and university graduates wishing to assert their cultural
leadership:w
In the 1890s a radical faction of the association made language
central to an overtly racialist definition of a Pan-Germanic Urvolk.
Founded by the purist Adolf Reinecke in 1896, Heimdall: Journal for
Pure Germandom and Pan-Germandom embraced language as the most
important criterion for membership in the German race. The publica-
tion was named for the third son of Wotan and cited J. G. Fichte when
declaring German to be an especially pure Ursprache. Radical German-
izers, such as Reinecke and Hermann von Pfister-Schwaighusen, tried
to "correct" their native tongue and the conventions with which it was
written by appealing to archaic forms. Runes, for example, were to be
used in all ceremonial occasions. 40 Reinecke likewise drew on linguistic
research to legitimate territorial expansion, seeking to include all Ger-
man speakers within a larger Reich. Like other radical nationalists of the
period, adherents to this movement were decidedly anti-Semitic. And
they appealed to the supposed precedent of early nineteenth-century
philologists to justifY their perverted policies.
This radical form of linguistic nationalism, which forced the ac-
quisition of colonies and fueled German militarism, claimed continuity
with a Romantic conception of the Volk. However, it represents a nos-
talgic and artificial revival of ideas once mustered to challenge the le-
gitimacy of the dynastic state. Individuals within the comparatively lib-
eral and Enlightened field of linguistics had long since questioned
whether a binding relationship existed between language, nationhood,
and ethnic or racial descent. Within the vOikisch ideology of Wil-

250
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

helmine radicals, language symbolized a shared ethnicity and racial al-

legiance. As will be seen, outside the field of comparative linguistics,
other German philologists also continued to search for formative
points of origin and subscribed to racialist histories of German national
descent. Even a republican, such as the Prussian historian Friedrich
Meinecke, claimed in 1907 that Germans defined themselves a Kultur-
nation, based on a shared inheritance of language, religion, and cus-
41
toms.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE: HEYMANN STEINTHAL

Within the relatively liberal field of linguistics, comparative philologists

such as Heymann Steinthal began moving away from the origin
paradigm and examining the general laws that governed the life of lan-
guage. Born the son of a linen salesman in Grobzig, Anhalt, Steinthal
attended Hebrew school before entering the University of Berlin to
study linguistics. His main contribution to the field was to revive inter-
est in the linguistic writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, which he
edited in 1884. As a Jew Steinthal never obtained a full professorship
in Germany or a position in the Prussian Academy of Sciences, al-
though he taught at his alma mater starting in 1856. Yet his influential
critique of Humboldt reanimated discussion of the epistemological sig-
nificance of language and rdayed to the late nineteenth century an ear-
lier tradition in the philosophy of language. Steinthal's reflections di-
rectly influenced Friedrich Nietzsche's appreciation of language's
origin in unconscious instincts, as well as his linguistic critique of con-
ceptual thought. Steinthal's contemporaries, the Neogrammarians,
however, remained suspicious of the way he applied psychology to the
field, as it deviated markedly from the positivist leaning of much late
nineteenth -century linguistics.
The principles of psychology offered Steinthal a tool for curbing
what he perceived as Humboldt's lingering faith in universal rational
structures. Agreeing with Humboldt's dictum that language was a
"creative organ of thought," Steinthal denied that national tongues
harbored philosophical truth. In his view, all linguistic forms arose from
the unconscious and reflected the nationally specific structures that
shaped instinctual life. Language lacked stable rderence points in the
external world, as well as any foundation in logic or rationality. For this
reason the addition of psychology to linguistics confirmed the auton-
omy with which language intervened in the thought process. For

251
 The comparative linguist Heymann Steinthal in the year he published
the edited works of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1884). From Ingrid Belke,
ed. Moritz Lazarus und Heymann Steinthal: Die Begrunder der
Volkerpsychologie in ihren Briefen (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1983).
(Courtesy Leo Baeck Institute, New York)
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

Steinthal cognition depended on the symbolic forms of language as

they were forged by instinct and the unconscious.
Humboldt's chief weakness, according to Steinthal, was to have
promoted a "dualistic" view of language. 42 He wrongly resorted to
"mysticism,,43 when reconciling theoretical, a priori assumptions about
language as a system with historical case studies. 44 Intrigued, nonethe-
less, Steinthal pursued a question central to Humboldt's project, tak-
ing up "the fight against the enemy within and emerging victorious.,,45
Specifically, he sought to clarifY "the relationship of language to
thought and of grammatical forms to the logical forms of thought. ,,46
Steinthal adopted Humboldt's notion that the inner form of language
was a mechanism for explaining the supposed consistency with which
national tongues shaped the mind. Unlike his predecessor, however,
Stein thai asserted that the inner form of language provided the only
applicable standards of rationality. There was no preexisting metaphys-
ical world to which language referred; its effectiveness could not be
measured by external markers.47
The new perspective Steinthal brought to Humboldt emerged in
a fusion of Hegelian philosophy and the psychology of Johann
Friedrich Herbart. As a student of comparative philology in Berlin,
Stein thai had worked closely with Carl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse
(1797-1855), the main representative of Hegelianism in linguistics.
Heyse suggested to Steinthal and Lazarus how Hegel's understanding
of Spirit ( Geist) and historical development could be applied to linguis-
tics. The pair first mer in Heyse's classroom and quickly solidified a
close intellectual and personal friendship; Steinthal later married his
friend's sister, Jeanette. In Steinthal's view Humboldt had wrongly re-
garded Spirit as "power without substrate," "an impetus to activity,"
without connection to its actual manifestations in the empirical world.
He applied Hegel's notion of objective spirit to Humboldt's view of
language, in order to explain how Idea became immanent. 1s
The solution to resolving Humboldt's contradictions was for
Steinthal to eliminate metaphysics. His predecessor should never have
approached language as "a being ... to be understood in ontological
categories. ,,49 Steinthal, like Ernest Renan, assumed the soul created
language without reasoned reflection. The question of its origin there-
fore fell to psychology, not metaphysics. The linguist, Steinthal insisted,
"leaves behind the metaphysical ground upon which the antinomies of
Humboldt's dialectic rest and transfers the question over to the field of

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 CHAPTER 6

psychology.... He called language ... 'enC1:geia,' a 'work of the spirit':

from this we learn that its contemplation belongs to psychology. "so
Stein thaI aimed to isolate the psychological mechanism that enabled
language to emerge from the lower functions of the soul. This perspec-
tive emphasized universal, rather than historical, dimensions in the pro-
duction of language.
Steinthal's treatise Grammar, Logic, and Psychology: Their Princi-
ples and Relations to Another (1855) embedded language and rational-
ity within the psychological processes that governed instinctual life.
The text was written while the author resided in Paris, funded by the
Volney prize in linguistics, which he received for an essay on Mrican
languages in 1851. For three years Steinthal studied Chinese, Tibetan,
southeast and central Asian languages, as well as West African languages
at College de France and the Ecole des langues orientales vivantes.
During this time, he became well acquainted with Ernest Renan. Al-
though rejecting Renan' s in terpreta tion of the Semi tic instinct for
monotheism,S! Stein thaI agreed that language was "an organ of the
soul,,52 that spontaneously appeared with the development of other psy-
chological functions. The text specifically brought psychology to bear
against the "logical formalism" of Karl Ferdinand Becker. 53 Becker
claimed to have discovered universal metaphysical categories lurking in
the grammatical forms of the world's tongues. Steinthal countered that
the forms of language were not vestiges of transcendental rationality,
but rather psychological phenomena that emerged from the soul.
Similar to Fichte and the German idealists, Steinthal derived the
origin of language from ahistorical laws governing the human mind.
For him, though, language emerged in a pre-rational soul subject only
to universal psychological principles. "Language always originates from
the soul of a person in the same fashion," he explained, "and this
source is eternally the same. Language is an emanation, an unfolding
of the soul. It always occurs with natural, organic necessity when the
development of the soul reaches a certain point .... Thus the soul cre-
ates language today, as it did in primitive times. ,,54 He assumed the soul
had a life before the onset of speech; its earliest "agitations" included
"feeling, sensation, intuition" that produced a primitive form of con-
sciousness. Language only emerged after people became conscious of
their consciousness. And the transition to self-awareness occurred
without the subject's will or intention. An initial "passage from soul to
spirit" produced a type of "instinctive self-consciousness" that was the

254
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

prerequisite for language. ss The actual "breaking through oflanguage"

transpired through speech. According to Steinthal, "perception of in-
tuition" was nothing more than "setting intuition to sound. ,,56 The
tlrst sounds fixed "the inner linguistic form of intuition," a principle
that subsequently guided development of conceptual thought. s7 For
Stein thai, the soul thus created language and thought at the same mo-
ment.
The third stage in the evolution of human consciousness required
the maturation of language out of its original embryonic state. As the
inner form oflanguage crystallized, regulating the relationship between
sound and mental presentations, speakers gained the capacity for con-
ceptual thought. Reasoned reflection demanded that the mind analyze
and manipulate representations (Vorstellungen). These were presenta-
tions (Anschaungen) that entered the consciousness after being shaped
by a combination of sound and the inner form oflanguage. Mental rep-
resentations always took symbolic form in language as they entered the
consciousness. Grammar and syntax then submitted representations to
logical evaluation, creating concepts. In this way language allowed the
mind to evolve from a purely receptive organ to an active force capable
of self-consciously manipulating ideas. S8
Several psychological principles that Steinthal adopted from
Herbart explained how language allowed an individual to be conscious
of the presentations that entered the mind. A disaffected Kantian,
Herbart believed there were no innate ideas or concepts; the soul was
formed through contact with the sensible world. Feelings and desires
produced presentations in the mind, which variously sank and rose
across the threshold of consciousness. The psychological process of ap-
perception determined which representations entered the conscious-
ness. Stein thai concluded that this mechanism controlled the "content
of thought"SY by determining the "images, comparisons, and
metaphors" through which the individual experienced his or her sense
impressions. 60 For this reason, Steinthal considered representations "a
purely psychological form, the manner by which intuitions, thought,
and their content are present in consciousness. ,,61 Apperception like-
wise determined how new ideas mingled with existing concepts. Masses
of strong and weak representations were always already present in the
consciousness. Apperception stepped in "to make connections in what
once seemed disjointed, contradictory, and incomprehensible.,,62

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 CHAPTER 6

Language was the dominant "medium of apperception," accord-

ing to Steinthal. He considered it to be a "sixth sense,,,63 which filtered
into consciousness the content of the soul, as well as sensations from
the empirical world. "Speaking," he explained, "means essentially and
primarily to understand oneself.,,64 Out of the dark chambers of the soul
where sensations and ideals lurked, "tower up sounds into full con-
sciousness. ,,65 Words also governed the "negotiations between one soul
and another."M Language was a condition of communication and un-
derstanding for Steinthal. "Sound," he wrote, "builds a bridge between
both, extending the consciousness of one into that of the other. ,,67 This
justified applying the mechanisms of individual psychology to the lin-
guistic community as a whole. Members of a nation shared in a collec-
tive consciousness because the same sounds and grammatical structures
molded their subjective awareness of the soul and external world, as
well as their perceptions of each other.
The second psychological process Steinthal tied to language reg-
ulated conceptual thought. The consciousness, Herbart had suggested,
was too narrow to simultaneously embrace all impressions and ideas.
The mind had to rely on language to compress presentations into sym-
bolic form. Steinthal and Lazarus concluded that language was central
to a process termed "condensation [Verdichtung] of thought." The
word was the "furnace of intuition, the workshop ofconcepts,,6H which
resulted in giving "an eternally discursive character to thought.,,69 The
compression of thought was a psychological phenomenon common to
the individual. But, as Lazarus argued, it also allowed for collective
progress in human history. Language was the receptacle for the "end-
less sum of prior thoughts, an unspeakably rich treasure of the spirit. ,,711
It transmitted concepts developed by earlier generations and allowed
for continuity in the national spirit of a people.
The causes of national diversity within this complex were twofold,
emanating from the "inner linguistic form" and phonetic considera-
tions. 71 Stcinthal concluded that the production of sound depended on
"language organs" and on the "individual constitution of the body.,,72
At the same time, the inner form of language varied according to "the
way instinctive self-consciousness appropriates intuitions and trans-
forms them into representations.,,73 Present in the deep recess of the
soul, "instinctive freedom" or "subjectivity" gave form to a language's
grammatical structures. 74 Steinthal's Classification of Languages ( 1850)

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 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

ranked national tongues based on the degree to which they had per-
fected an inner form. One could test "the power of language to con-
dense, as well as its efficacy in fostering nimble, versatile and ... clear
thought," he believed, by studying the "imperfect languages of wild
people" in which the process of abstraction "remained unfinished. ,,75
Most peoples, Stein thai proposed, had a "compulsion to express the
content of thought ever more precisely." This impulse created the for-
mal elements of language. Inflection, isolation, and agglutination were
for him the "different effects of psychological drives, various external-
izations of the diverse means to imagine the self. ,,76 But such distinc-
tions only emerged at a relatively advanced stage in a nation's history.
Some peoples still presided over prehistoric languages that had never
perfected an inner form. Steinthal divided the world's tongues into two
main groupings: "languages with forms" which include the Indo- Eu-
rope an and Semitic families, as well as Egyptian and Basque, and
"formless languages" such as Chinese, Turkish, Finnish, and Mongo-
lian, and also Native American, Polynesian, and African languages. The
fully matured languages of the Indo- European family "adapted most
readily to the forms of self-conscious thought-activity"r their grammar
structures separated categories of being and doing and distinguished
content from form. By contrast, Steinthal's case study The Mende-
Negro Languages, Presented Psychologically and Phonetically (1867) of-
fered a profile of the "primitive" mind, as it grouped the Mende, Vai,
Susu, and Bambara languages of northwestern Sudan into one family.78
The powers Steinthal attributed to language reinforced its auton-
omy as a constructive force that molded the inner life of subjects and
their experience of the world. National tongues, in his view, created
"their forms independently of logic in absolute autonomy. ,,79 There
were no external standards of rationality for evaluating the adequacy of
linguistic representations. "Autonomy reigns in language," he argued
in 1871, "it can create and transform ... spontaneously ... : thus it is
everywhere and above all in control; and no logic claims the right to
made demands of it. "so Nor was language responsible for accurately
mirroring an empirical world. National tongues depicted objects "en-
tirely and exclusively based on their own laws ... which arise from the
nature of their own goals and means, and are not dictated by the ob-
jects being represented."~l One could only measure the strength of a
language's life force. "Iflanguage is autonomous," Steinthal reckoned,

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"its excellence only lies in letting this autonomy govern with proper
force; the force of a language's autonomy is the objective measure of its
excellence. ,,82
Cognition thus depended for Steinthal on an autonomous
medium which unconscious instincts had endowed with independent
drives and desires. In his view national tongues had their origin in the
pre-rational soul and only mistakenly had been linked to logic or a
prelinguistic form of rationality. Language was neither bound to ab-
stract metaphysical structures nor to the objects and ideas it repre-
sented. As a result, the unconscious held sway over conceptual thought,
and human subjects never achieved complete sovereignty over discur-
sive practices. Steinthal's fusion of psychology and linguistics likewise
highlighted the general conditions governing the life of language. He
contributed to the dehistoricization of language study by depicting na-
tional tongues as the products of universal laws regulating conscious-
ness. B3 Rather than document specific historical transformations in the
grammar or lexicon of languages, he speculated on the general condi-
tions of language production. Language, in Steinthal's definition, was
the verbal expression of the soul's inner life. He further divided the
speech act into three elements (the "capacity for language," the "phys-
iological ability to produce articulated sounds," and "linguistic mate-
rial"),84 from which Waltraud Bumann has suggested Ferdinand de
Saussure derived his tripartite distinction of language, langue, and pa-
role. B'

LANGUAGE AND GENEALOGY: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The young Friedrich Nietzsche found intriguing Steinthal's synthesis of

words and desires, as well as his displacing the origin of language onto
the unconscious. The central role language assumed in Nietzsche's in-
creasingly ambitious cultural criticism extended the implications of
Steinthal's drawing attention to the instinctual, unconscious drives
lurking beneath conceptual language. Through Steinthal's transmis-
sion, Nietzsche likewise became familiar with the linguistic critique of
Kantian metaphysics that Hamann and Herder initiated in the late
cighteenth century. These two perspectives fueled Nietzsche's episte-
mological skepticism and his radical critique of human subjectivity as it
developed after the Reichsgriindung. A number of scholars have tied
Nietzsche's background ill the classics to his mature philosophical oeu-
vre. 86 Comparative philology, not the classics, however, provided the

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 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

precedent for discussing how words and grammar molded the mind.
Nietzsche embraced the discipline's constructivist view of language
while making a radical critique of genealogy, and the origin paradigm,
occasion for unmasking the creative powers of language.
Born in the small village of Rocken twenty miles from Leipzig, the
young Friedrich Nietzsche followed a well-trod nineteenth-century
path of defection from theology to philology. After attending the pres-
tigious Schulpforta boarding school on a scholarship, Nietzsche initially
pursued the career of his late father. When philology brought on in
Nietzsche a crisis of faith, he transferred to Leipzig to begin classical
studies with Friedrich Ritschl, quickly rising as a star student. Nietzsche
came to regard language as a philosophical problem during the initial
moments of his disaffection with classical philology. As Federico Ger-
ratana has shown, the restless doctoral student took increasing notice of
the natural scientific dimensions of linguistics and its model of language
during his last years in Leipzig. 87 Nietzsche's notes from the brief period
of his military service in 1867-68 list Steinthal's Philology, History, and
Psychology in their Mutual Relations (1864) and Curtius's lectures as
important counterparts to August Boeckh's encyclopedia of philology.
According to Gerratana, the pretensions linguistics had to being a nat-
ural science offered Nietzsche an escape from what he regarded as the
pitfalls of historical knowledge. The methodology of linguistics stood in
sharp contrast to the intuitive, individual character of philological inter-
pretation. "Amazing is the progress of comparative philology," Nietz-
sche noted in his journal. xx An "all too strong subjectivity" had spread
like an "epidemic" through classical studies. A "natural sci. understand-
ing of the essence oflanguage," would, in Nietzsche's view, allow for a
"natural sci. manner of contemplating antiquity."s9
By the late 1860s language appeared to Nietzsche as a key to in-
vestigating the human condition. The "most beautiful triumph" of
comparative philology, in his view, was its "philosophical perspective. ,,90
The field encouraged observers to "step back toward the beginnings of
all culture ... and seek a path to the problems of thought. ,,91 "It must
be a philosopher," he suggested in a notebook entry, "who concerns
himself with it [language]. ,,92 Specifically, Nietzsche believed that a sci-
entific approach to language would enable a "description of instinctive
life, its laws, etc. ,,93 His inaugural lecture at the University of Basel,
therefore, described the field of language studies as "one portion his-
tory, a portion natural science, and a portion aesthetics." The scientific

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basis of linguistics enabled one to "probe the deepest instinct of man,

the language instinct [Sprachinstinkt]. ,,94
Nietzsche's own fragment "On the Origin of Language"
(1869-70) explored the philosophical and psychological issues of con-
cern to Steinthal and other linguists. The piece documents Nietzsche's
emerging interest in the relationship between language and thought, as
well as the two tacks that guided his future reflections on the topic. He
rejected "all earlier naive standpoints" that language could be the con-
scious creation of individuals or a community. Rather, it had to be
treated as "the product of an instinct." A reading of Eduard von Hart-
mann's Philosophy of the Unconscious ( 1869), especially a chapter titled
"The Unconscious in the Emergence of Language," guided Nietz-
sche's interpretation of the origin of language. 9s And notably, Hart-
mann's synopsis credited Heymann Steinthal when declaring language
to be the product of "unconscious mental activity. ,,96 The chapter cited
his claim that language could not be the product of "conscious think-
ing spirit. ,,97 Rather, as Hartmann explained, the evolution of each na-
tional tongue "can only be explained based on one instinct common to
humanity-to create language."n He followed Steinthal in suggesting
that language mediated which sense impressions entered the conscious-
ness and which converged to form abstract concepts. "Every conscious
human thought [is] first possible with language," Hartmann asserted.
"Progress in the development oflanguage" was the "condition," rather
than the "consequence," of advances in thought. 99
Hartmann's transmission likewise acquainted Nietzsche with the
legacy of the linguistic metacritique of Kant. Nietzsche noted in 1869
that "the deepest philosophical insights are already contained in lan-
guage"; he ventured further that the conceptual categories subject and
object in Kantian philosophy were merely "abstracted trom the gram-
matical sentence." In Kant's hands, "the subject and predicate devel-
oped into the substance and accidence." lOll These insights informed
Nietzsche's later critique of metaphysics and bestowed a second life on
the tradition of Hamann and Herder. Hartmann had commented on
how the pair interpreted the "philosophical worth of grammatical
forms." Linguistic distinctions between subject and predicate, subject
and object had, Hartmann recounted, shaped the history of philoso-
phy, especially Kant's notion of judgment.
Until 1873 when Nietzsche began preparing lectures on rhetoric,
however, he idealized primordial language as representing an uncor-

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 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

rupted moment of human origin. Specifically, he posited the existence

of two different types or levels of language. Earliest language had been
an unconscious product of the instincts and thus maintained an essen-
tial connection to the innermost being and will of its creator. From this
had grown an impoverished language of conscious representation; the
images of the early period had been symbolized ever more strictly in
words and concepts. For Nietzsche, contemporary languages sustained
an illusionary Apollonian world where logic, grammar, and abstractions
agreed upon by convention were understood as real. 101 In the years sur-
rounding The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietz-
sche probed the artistic realm of unconscious language production in
the hopes of peeling back what he saw as the artifices of representation.
Only the self-consciously aesthetic language of the genius, in his view,
was capable of giving adequate expression to real existence.
Nietzsche considered music, in particular, to be the paradigm
against which to measure the limitations and possibilities of language.
The fragment "On Music and Words" (1871) proclaimed music to be
the privileged first language of humanity (Ursprache). In his view, the
art form had originated in a primordial, Dionysian sphere of existence
and maintained an exclusive bond to what Nietzsche termed the "orig-
inal Oneness, the ground of Being."lo2 Following Arthur Schopen-
hauer, Nietzsche interpreted music "as the immediate language of the
will. ,,103 The spoken word, by contrast, emerged as an "imitation of the
language of music," preserving a weaker, yet ever-present resonance
with the world of primitive desire. lo4 Nietzsche contradicted Schopen-
hauer in insisting that the "whole realm of drives, the interplay of feel-
ings, sensations, emotions, and acts of will" could only be known
through representations, not directly in their essence. There was no di-
rect "bridge" leading to the "kernel" of being; one encountered only
its "expression in images." Words were therefore valid "symbols" of
these images. The "duality . .. built into the essence of language" en-
sured that each national tongue preserved a musical core. Each lan-
guage had a "tonal background" that was universal and intelligible in
that it "echoed" the shared primeval past of human beings. The "will"
found symbolic expression in "the tone of the speaker. ,,105
The Birth of Tragedy distinguished "two main currents" in the
history of Greek poetry according to whether language was "used to
imitate the world of appearance or that of music. ,,10(, Lyric poetry and
folk tales, Nietzsche argued, showed a remarkable affinity with music.

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In contrast to epics and the opera, the content of words and concepts
did not threaten the musicality of these verbal art forms. 107 Nietzsche
especially believed that the dramatic dithyrambs of Greek antiquity,
choric poems or chants sung by revelers in honor of Dionysus, were
musical mirrors of the cosmos. Like the chorus in Attic tragedy, lyric
poetry allowed for a "mysterious marriage "IOH of the worlds of will and
appearance. Its Apollonian language made music visible. Words recalled
in the tone of the speaker the primordial "oneness of nature" without
collapsing into empty concepts and content.
In his Romantic desire to tap into a lost world of will and desire,
the early Nietzsche revealed a veneration for intact origins that resem-
bled the nostalgic genealogies of earlier philologists. The Birth of
Tragedy mythologized the Ursprache as both a formative and redemp-
tive force in the development of German national culture. Ancient
Greece and its linguistic practices offered Nietzsche an idealized model
for strengthening the new nation-state. He feared that modern Ger-
many was "caught in the net of Alexandrian culture,,109 to the extent
that the prestige assigned to knowledge and conscious intelligence was
having a corrosive influence on instinctual life. The "imminent rebirth
of Greek antiquity" would allow the "German genius" to free itself
from "the leading strings of Romance culture." I 10 The tradition ofGer-
man philosophy and, especially, of German music from Bach to
Beethoven and Wagner, promised a "gradual reawakening of the
Dionysiac spirit." III This retrospective on Greek culture was framed
within a larger Indo-European context. Greek mythology, Nietzsche
noted, especially the tale of Prometheus, was "indigenous to the entire
community of Aryan races." Tragic vision and the heroic striving to-
ward universality was an Aryan ambition, diametrically opposed to the
passive, feminine, Semitic myth of the fal1. 112
The relative optimism of the Birth of Tragedy evaporated with
Nietzsche's denial in the winter of 1872-73 that one could resurrect an
absolute language of representation. Music, he concluded, was not the
language of nature that directly expressed the Ur-eine. Nor could the
artist convincingly construct such a world artificially. This change re-
flects Nietzsche's break with Richard Wagner, but also a new sensitiv-
ity to the rhetorical dimension of human expression. ll3 While preparing
a lecture course called "The History of Greek Eloquence" he lost faith
in the representational function of language. Words had no preexisting
referents in an authentic realm of existence; their artistic qualities ex-

262
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

isted alone for their own pleasure and purposes. This perspective al-
tered the expectations Nietzsche held out for origins. No longer a for-
mative moment of truth which endured despite the vagaries of time,
the origin of language highlighted the total caprice of concepts.
One of the main sources for Nietzsche's depiction of ancient
rhetoric was Gustav Gerber's Language as Art (1871). The text pre-
sented a history of German language philosophy from Hamann,
Herder, Humboldt, Bernhardi, and Grimm through Max Muller,
Steinthal, and Lazarus. Nietzsche's linguistic critique of epistemology
clearly built upon the inspiration of the Metakritiker. Gerber had
wished to mesh the observations of comparative philology with August
Boeckh's concern for the '''artistic use' of languagc"-rhctoric, aes-
thetics, and poetics. 114 He developed "what Kant began to examine as
the 'critique of pure reason' ... as a critique of impure reason, what
has become objective, thus as a critique of language. ,,115 This project
necessitated, in Gerber's view, first and foremost an analysis of the
"artistic character of language.,,116 Agreeing with Heymann Steinthal,
he suggested that any discussion must derive the origin of language
from "the nature of man.,,117 Only for Gerber living language was an
unconscious creation of the Kunsttrieb, specifically, or the instinct for
art. For Nietzsche this perspective undermined the claim that knowl-
edge and ethical systems, built as they were on conceptual language, ac-
tually referenced stable, preexisting universal principles.
"On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense" (1873) devel-
oped the intellectual implications of language originating in an artistic
impulse. Nietzsche opened the essay by questioning why human beings
had such an intense "desire for truth" given that their perspective on
the world was as provincial as the gnat's. He argued that the "legisla-
tion of language" had established the "first laws of truth" in a fit of de-
ception.llB People had trusted the unstable foundations of language be-
cause the very idea of truth enabled them to escape a bellicose state of
nature. Only by regarding language as an "adequate expression of all
realities,,1l9 was reliable communication possible. Accepting the illusion
that words referred to things allowed early humans to live in mutual
trust and security. The invention of truth thus had "pleasant, life-pre-
serving consequences.,,120 Society, however, thereby exchanged a set of
lies for the truth. Deception and false representation acquired a norma-
tive moral value, which Nietzsche exposed as self-destructive.
Faith in truth depended for Nietzsche on a process of forgetting.

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People had to deny and repress the actual origins of language in order
to believe in the accuracy of representations, for acknowledging the
rhetorical foundation of words would have destabilized the shaky edi-
fice of truth. Nietzsche's critique of representational language assumed
that "language itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts." The artistic
impulses that transformed nerve stimuli into images and these into
sounds and words were dominated by metaphors and arbitrary trans-
ferences. The origin of language was therefore not "a logical pro-
cess. ,,121 The relationship of a word to its referent was always partial,
transferable, and reversible, subject to three tropes: synecdoche,
metaphor, and metonymy.122 Signs, for this reason, were arbitrary, not
"correspond[ing] at all to the original entities." The sounds that stood
for the image of an object or idea were "based as little as rhetoric is
upon that which is true, upon the essence of things." Language "des-
ignate[d] only the relations of things to men."m Things in themselves
did not pass into consciousness, but "the manner in which we stand to-
ward them. ,,124
Language, consequently, could never instruct speakers about the
true nature of objects. It could only convey a subjective impulse. The
lectures on rhetoric offer an early formulation of Nietzsche's perspec-
tivism, or the notion that full and essential knowledge of the world can-
not be had. 125 One could only ever encounter the partial images that
nerve impulses made of objects. On this basis Nietzsche concluded that
truth was nothing but "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, an-
thropomorphisms," "in short, a sum of human relations which were
poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and
after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are
illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions." 126
Abstract language was most guilty of perpetuating the illusion of truth.
Concepts, Nietzsche asserted, claimed the greatest scientific authority
while repressing most violently their origins in rhetoric. 127
Nietzsche took greatest issue with the continued social sanction
of these illusions and the life-denying implications this had for the in-
dividual. In his view, society imposed a moral obligation to be "truth-
ful" and uphold established metaphors. To lie collectively became
mandatory for everyone. And people soon did so unconsciously. An ed-
ifice of false concepts acquired the "rigid regularity of a Roman colum-
barium," according to Nietzsche, and this increasingly detached human
beings from "the concrete world of primary impressions. ,,128 Constantly

264
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

repressing his desires, man forgot himself as "an artistically creative

'
su bJect.
,,129

The power of illusions was not absolute for Nietzsche, however.

Truth may have been "the sepulcher of intuition," but humanity's re-
pressed instincts repeatedly returned, forcing people to reckon with the
"terrible powers which constantly press[ed] upon" them. 130 The second
section of his essay proposed a revaluation of the individual's relation-
ship to language that tapped into the life-affirming potential of artistic
drives. Recognizing the rhetorical foundations of knowledge would, in
his view, liberate "intuitive man." Nietzsche envisioned a new, life-af-
firming relationship to language and truth. The "liberated intellect"
would approach the existing edifice of concepts like a "scaffolding and
plaything for his boldest artifices. "UI Future individuals would "speak
in sheer forbidden metaphors and unheard of conceptual compounds
... smashing and scorning old conceptual barriers.,,132
"On Truth and Lying" signaled a new relationship to origins and
the rewards Nietzsche hoped to reap by practicing linguistic genealogy.
As Michel Foucault has argued, Nietzsche inverted the traditional Ger-
man attempt to capture the exact essence and identity of things by un-
covering their origins. Origins were a site of truth in the older view;
they signified the existence of immobile forms that preceded the histor-
ical world.133 Mter 1873 Nietzsche no longer dreamed of resurrecting
an ideal cultural starting point for Germany, one that reached back to
a primordial period of authentic being. Rather, he began to write the
"history of an error we call truth. ,,134 Genealogy, for the later Nietzsche,
offered a powerful form of cultural criticism. Reconstructing the his-
tory of language could identify the accidents, errors, and false appraisals
that gave birth to conventional standards of truth and morality. Nietz-
sche's form of genealogy suggested that stable ontological categories
did not lie at the root of metaphysics but arose in the exteriority of ac-
cidents. It likewise dispelled the chimera of historical continuity and the
prospect that a formative moment of origin secretly animated the pre-
sent. 135 Etymology and the history of language had value for Nietzsche
as philosophical critique; philology did not sustain substantial identities
and the illusion of authenticity but unraveled them.
The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack (1887) offered a case study
of how etymology could destabilize the Christian "ethics of pity" byex-
posing its profane origins. It marks a new concern for the effects lan-
guage change had on cultural development, but also inaugurates Nietz-

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sche's linguistic critique of metaphysics. The Genealogy of Morals ap-

proached words as shapers of events that had through history trans-
formed and molded culture and human communities. Specifically, he
expected "the science of linguistics" to shed new light on "the evolu-
tion of moral ideas."u6 In Nietzsche's view, compassion and self-denial
posed "the greatest danger for humanity." For similar to "a narcotic
drug," these values turned the will against life.f.17 He hoped to cure Eu-
rope of Christianity by investigating how human beings had con-
structed the value judgments good and evil. l3H Nietzsche concluded
that the Christian world had attributed transcendental significance to
arbitrary linguistic conventions. Language, he suggested, had mysteri-
ously acquired ontological status as speakers mistook linguistic distinc-
tions for absolute metaphysical categories.
Tracing the history of terms for "good" allowed Nietzsche to pre-
sent Christian values as an aberration tl-om the vital morality of a mas-
ter race. Etymology proved that the spiritual designation "good" de-
rived from concepts of "nobility" in the sense of a social elite. By
contrast, the term "bad" had once referred to the common, plebian, or
base folk. These value judgments had affirmed the strength of a ruling
elite and given free rein to their instincts and desire. Dominant individ-
uals expressed their natural passions and creativity, unhampered by
transcendental notions of right and wrong. This morality had a racial
content for Nietzsche, having been introduced by an "Aryan race of
conquerors." The "good, noble, pure, originally the fair-haired" stood
in contrast to a "dark, black-haired native population,,139 who repre-
sented "human retrogression." Their influence had domesticated the
original instincts of the invaders and transformed a noble people into
"the mass of sickly and effete creatures whom Europe is beginning to
stink of today." 140
The "snare oflanguage" explained for Nietzsche how a weak class
of slaves could have usurped moral authority from this ruling elite. 141
He argued that the Christian notion of the soul was a strategic inven-
tion of the oppressed. But the peculiarities ofIndo-European grammar
had conditioned all people to honor their ideas. The strength of the no-
bility, in his view, had taken the form of un-self-conscious activity. Like
birds of prey, the masters obeyed natural urges. Devious in their re-
venge, however, priests suggested that all activity was "conditioned by
an agent-the 'subject.'" They separated the pure expression of
strength from "a neutral agent" that could freely choose to rein in or

266
 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

unleash its power. Once guided by a soul, human subjects felt an un-
natural moral responsibility to curtail their natural aggression. Nietz-
sche insisted that "no such agent exists"; there was no being behind the
doing. Instead, the "dupe oflinguistic habits" had naturalized the illu-
sion that an autonomous subject lurked behind every action. This
sleight of hand gave the "appearance of free choice. ,,142
The Genealogy of Morals specifically exposed as a linguistic fiction
the desire to submit to self-imposed responsibility or "guilt" (Schuld).
The moral category of bad conscience or duty had emerged, in Nietz-
sche's view, from the economic sphere of contracts and legal obliga-
tions. 14 .1 All feelings of obligation had their inception in material debts
( Schulden). When a person became unable to meet his obligations, he
had once been expected to offer compensation in the form of bestow-
ing pleasure. Powerful creditors had enjoyed watching the weak suffer
pain; the economic contract served as a legal warrant to exercise cru-
e1ty.144 Denied the opportunity to impose pain on others, the weak di-

rected their instincts inward, denying and mortifYing themselves to

gain a modicum of pleasure. Like a "wild beast hurling itself against the
bars of its cage," the slave class fetishized God as a form of self-pun ish-
ment. 14S This signified a redemptive moment in the ascetic, self-deny-
ing ideals of Christian morality for Nietzsche. The faithful wrongly as-
sumed that there was inherent meaning in the universe, a set of
universal ethical ideals that justified self-denial. Yet their attempt to cre-
ate meaning out of a void testified to another type of desire. Even a
"will to nothingness, a revulsion from life" preserved for Nietzsche a
kernel of the same will to power needed to rejuvenate the decadent cul-
ture of modern Europe. 146
Notebook entries from 1885 to 1886 show Nietzsche expanding
the linguistic critique of metaphysics at which he hinted in the essay
"On the Origin of Language." In a fragment on the predicate and in
later passages from Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and the Twilight of the
Idols (1888), Nietzsche dismantled what he considered to be an unten-
able metaphysical edifice built upon chance grammatical structures.
Analysis of language led him, on the one hand, to question the author-
ity of the coherent, knowing subject. The confidence philosophers in-
vested in the transcendental subject, as a stable center of knowledge,
was, in Nietzsche's view, merely a projection of misplaced faith in the
grammatical subject. Nietzsche likewise asserted that familiar ontolog-
ical categories, such as Being, substance, and causation, were illusions

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evoked by nothing more than grammatical habits. These linguistic con-

ventions, he hoped to show, hid a more brutal reality governed by an
ever-present will to power.
At the center of Nietzsche's epistemological skepticism lay a cri-
tique of the subject-predicate sentence structure. The predicate found
in Indo- European languages, he feared, raised the "erroneous idea that
the subject was cause." Everything that happens, he noted, "relates
predicatively to some kind of subject." For this reason, "man believes
himself to be cause, perpetrator." 147 It was a "falsification of facts," in his
view, to conclude that "the subject'!' is the condition of the predicate
'think. '" Philosophers were merely "following grammatical habits"
when they assumed that "behind every activity something is active.,,14R
For Nietzsche the transcendental subject, like the soul, had "a merely
apparent existence.,,149 The "I," in his view, was "a fable a fiction, a play
on words." It was a "surface phenomenon of consciousness, an acces-
sory to the act. ,,150 The "grammatical custom that adds a doer to every
deed,,151 obfuscated a deeper reality in which all appearances and actions
stemmed from "one basic form of will ... the will to power.,,152
Philosophy had become implicated in a "crude fetishism" of the
grammatical subject due to an error in evaluating free will. According
to Nietzsche, people wanted to believe "in the will as the cause in gen-
eral. ,,153 The practice of attributing actions to a grammatical subject en-
abled them to imagine a sovereign intention behind every cause. 154
Priests, for example, wanted individuals to bear responsibility for their
actions so they could judge and punish others; they had invented the
soul in order to impose punishments in the name of God. This "disas-
ter of an error,,155 had implications for the faith philosophers placed in
God and the existence of fixed essences. Language wrongly became the
measure of reality for Nietzsche, so that "every word, every sentence"
became proof of a divinely inspired rational order. '''Reason' in lan-
guage," Nietzsche elaborated, "oh what a deceitful old woman! I am
afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in gram-
mar. ,,156 Language, in his view, gave birth to a false theology and pre-
vented philosophers from questioning inherited metaphysical struc-
tures.
Nietzsche notably associated these pitfalls with the Indo-Euro-
pean language family, recalling earlier forms of linguistic determinism.
The "strange family resemblance" he perceived in Indian, Greek, and
German thought stemmed, in his view, from a "common philosophy of

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 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

grammar." Bound by the "spell of particular grammatical functions,"

Indo-European speakers had succumbed to the "unconscious domina-
tion and direction" of language. ls7 Furthermore, Nietzsche compared
the tyranny of language to "the spell of physiological value judgments
and racial conditioning. ,,158 He assumed that a language's "tempo of
style" was "grounded in the character of the race." Germans, for exam-
ple, were incapable of "presto" in their language, developing instead a
style that was "ponderous, lumbering, solemnly awkward, . . . long-
winded and boring. "IS9
Nietzsche's radical critique of reason and subjectivity did not end
in despair. The practice of genealogy gave philosophers the unique op-
portunity to "rise above the belief in grammar" and renounce their se-
ductive "governess. ,,160 Starting with Beyond Good and Evil) his own
writing increasingly turned to fragments, aphorisms, metaphors, and
parodies as a more legitimate means of creating meaning than the con-
ceptuallanguage of logic. The language of transgression, madness, im-
propriety, and excess was preferable to scientific discourse for Nietzsche
because it openly avowed its deception and admitted to being an artis-
tic construct. 161 Nietzsche likewise explored how a new relationship to
language could enhance the creativity of dynamic individuals and fur-
ther their will to power. For people who self-consciously wielded the
power oflanguage, each moment oflinguistic production imposed val-
ues that molded human society. By manipulating the spoken and writ-
ten word, the strong gained an ability to change existing values within
language itself and within broader cultural or moral systems. For the
late Nietzsche, human beings had the capacity to exploit the uncon-
scious foundations of language as creative possibilities and to translate
them into a conscious will, force, and action. 162 This emancipatory prac-
tice depended on a critical view of origins and a new relationship to ge-
nealogy.

STRUCTURALIST LINGUISTICS:
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE

Ferdinand de Saussure likewise responded critically to the idealization

of origins within fin-de-siecle German linguistics, himself probing the
limits of the speaking subject'S agency. Whereas Nietzsche critically
reappropriated the genealogical method, Saussure met the crisis of his-
toricism facing linguistics by emphasizing the synchronic dimensions of
language. The recognized father of structuralist linguistics all but elim-

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inated the allure origins and diachronic change held for his followers.
At any given moment in history, language appeared to Saussure as an
autonomous system of signification whose laws operated without the
knowing participation of speakers. Signs, in his view, were arbitrary so
that speakers lacked a stable foundation for intervening in the language
state that confronted them. Like Nietzsche, Saussure denied the exis-
tence of stable external referents in either the material or metaphysical
world. In his view signs represented nothing more than a series of rela-
tional values determined by structures internal to the language system
itself. For this reason the idea of a self-determining speaking subject
was merely an illusion conjured by a false sense of language having ex-
ternal referents.
Saussure's synchronic approach to linguistics is frequently seen as
a radical departure from the past. His Course on General Linguistics
(1916) often assumes iconic status as a "zero hour" in intellectual his-
tory, a new point of departure for twentieth-century structuralists. 163
And it certainly inspired a new style of humanistic inquiry. In his inau-
gural lecture to the College de France in 1961, the anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss recognized Saussure as the founder of a new sci-
ence of signs or semiotics that had applications across the human sci-
ences. IM Historians of linguistics, however, rightly maintain the neces-
sity of situating Saussure within the German tradition of comparative
philology. 165 He trained under the Neogrammarians in Leipzig, exhibit-
ing an extraordinary talent for historical linguistics before transferring
his energies to the general study of language.
Saussure's interest in synchronic linguistics evolved gradually out
of his comparative-historical studies. There was no abrupt moment of
conversion nor any dramatic defection from the German field. In fact,
other linguists trained in the same milieu questioned the origin
paradigm at the same time. In the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the inability to explain language change over time drew the atten-
tion of some Neogrammarians, for example, to the role of the speaker.
Saussure adapted aspects of the methodology Hermann Paul presented
in his Principles of the History of Language, building on a critique of his-
torical-mindedness internal to the Neogrammarian movement itself.
Philologists outside of Germany, such as the American William Dwight
Whitney (1827-94), also explored problems of language use, rather
than continuing to regard language as an independent organism with
its own internal mechanisms of growth. This attention to the role of

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language in communication and social interaction raised synchronic

concerns. Saussure borrowed terminology and the impetus to create a
general theory of language from figures trained within the German
philological tradition, as well as from informed critics abroad. Unlike
Whitney, Michel Brtal (1832-19 I 5), and other French critics of Ger-
man science, however, Saussure never endowed the speaking subject
with full semiotic agency, preferring to uphold the autonomy of the lin-
guistic system. His theory of representation limited the ability of the
subject to transcend the arbitrary structures that governed thought.
The young Genevan's initiation to the German tradition occurred
via a local star in Indo- European philology. A family friend introduced
Saussure to Adolphe Pieret, a compatriot and author of the Origins of
the Indo-Europeans or the Primitive Aryans (1859). By age twelve,
Saussure had read several chapters of the book and presented Pictet
with the outline of a "general system of language. ,,166 The older son of
a distinguished academic family, he entered the University of Geneva in
1875 intending to study chemistry but found himself drawn to courses
in Indo-European languages, especially the classical European tongues.
Having read Georg Curtius's Principles of Greek Etymology (1858),
Saussure decided to register at the University of Leipzig in the fall of
1876, just as the structuralist psychologist Wilhelm Wundt was estab-
lishing his psychology laboratory there. The founder of structuralist lin-
guistics trained at the same university where Wundt explored the struc-
tures of conscious experience, and Saussure later classified linguistics as
a field within social psychology. He attended Curtius's classes in com-
parative grammar and spent two years working closely with Karl Brug-
mann, Hermann Osthoff, Karl Verner, and August Leskien. With the
exception of a year in Berlin, where he studied Sanskrit, Saussure re-
mained in Leipzig until obtaining his doctorate in 1880.
The precocious student earned his credentials as a historical lin-
guist by the age of twenty-one, publishing a rigorous Memoir on the
Primitive System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages in 1878.
The text proposed recognizing the existence of another phoneme in
Proto-Indo- European in order to explain patterns of vowel alteration
in the languages known to derive from it. Saussure tackled the problem
of the sounds associated with the vowel "a," exemplitying the type of
historical reconstruction that was the hallmark of the Neogrammarians.
After it was deciphered, cuneiform Hittite was found to contain a
phoneme that behaved as Saussure had predicted; the student had dis-

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covered what in theory were later termed Indo-European laryngeals.

More importantly, as Jonathan Culler has suggested, the Memoir may
have helped Saussure conceive of language as a system of purely rela-
tional items. The author did not define the substance of the missing
phoneme but presented a formal missing "sonant coefficient.,,1<>7
The historically minded Memoir was Saussure's only major lifetime
publication. Two Geneva colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert
Sechehaye, compiled the Course in General Linguistics posthumously
from students' lecture notes. Already during his Leipzig years, however,
Saussure engaged debates on the general state of language that tran-
spired both within and in opposition to the German tradition. In the
early phases of his career Saussure formed an interest in synchronic lin-
guistics, fueled by intellectual encounters with William Dwight Whitney
and Hermann Paul. American and French scholars reacted first to the
extreme historicism of the German tradition, challenging the predomi-
nance of organicist metaphors that treated language as an autonomous
force independent of human affairs. 168 Whitney, Paul, and Breal encour-
aged researchers to consider the intentions, behavior, and mindset of
speakers when analyzing language, as well as the situation in which lan-
guage was used. Only by ceasing to regard national tongues as living be-
ings beyond the control of speakers could the general conditions that
shaped language be investigated. John Joseph has established that Saus-
sure met Whitney during a shared stay in Berlin in the spring of 1879.
In his view Whitney's critique of the German philological tradition in-
fluenced Saussure's conception of the institutional nature of language
and the need to develop synchronic linguistic inquiry.169
A professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale, Whit-
ney trained in Berlin and Tubingen during the early 1850s, returning
to Germany periodically to conduct research on his Sanskrit Grammar
(1879). He was the person most responsible for transplanting German
philological techniques to the United States, often competing with
Friedrich Max Muller for the ear of English-speaking audiences. Whit-
ney, however, rejected the perceived historical excesses of German lin-
guistic theory. Especially after 1870 he berated Schleicher and Max
Muller for their organicism and for a naturalistic model of language
change that down played the agency of human speakers. Steinthal he
faulted as well for a metaphysical mysticism that threatened the induc-
tive, empirical methods of true science. "Language is not an emanation
of the soul, nor a physical organism," Whitney explained, "but an insti-

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 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

tution, or part of human culture. ,,170 Words did not have a life of their
own, in his view; rather, language was a conventional tool of commu-
nication that speakers tailored toward their own purposes.
The great faux pas of German linguistics, according to Whitney,
was a propensity to eliminate the speaker from discussions of language
change. As he wrote in the Life and Growth of Language (1875), his
colleagues wrongly "den[ied] the agency of the human will in the
changes of speech. ,,171 Instead they relied on a "mysterious natural pro-
cess, in which men have no part," assuming that there were "organic
forces in speech itself which-by fermentation, or digestion, or crystal-
lization ... produce new material and alter old. ,,172 Whitney countered
that "individual minds, capable of choice, under wide-reaching motives
and inducements" produced language change. 173 The intervention of
conscious human will altered the linguistic framework inherited by a
given community. This change in perspective followed from Whitney's
declaring language to be the "most ancient and valuable of man's so-
cial institutions. ,,174 No longer an autonomous organism with its own
internal laws of development, language was a tool subject to human
needs and desires. An elaborate system of arbitrary signs allowed speak-
ers to communicate preexisting ideas and coordinate their actions; lan-
guage was a pragmatic instrument. Any little "bit oflinguistic growth,"
Whitney concluded, was "the act of a human being, working toward
definable ends under the government of recognizable motives. ,,175
Whitney challenged the very foundations of German linguistics,
and the Neogrammarians heard his call. August Leskien translated the
Life and Growth of Language in 1876, and the text had a significant im-
pact on the Leipzig circle. I76 The commemoration Brugmann wrote
upon Whitney's death, for example, credited the American with help-
ing German I ndo- Europeanists to "turn against a number of widely
spread methodological flaws in the[ ir] research. ,,177 Saussure noted
Whitney'S influence on his own development in several manuscript
pages. And Konrad Koerner has concluded that Whitney was a major
source for Saussure's conceiving of language as a social system. Whit-
ney suggested that understanding language change required exploring
the relationship between the individual and the speech community. He
likewise affirmed that language could be conceived as a totality and in-
troduced Saussure to the term "value" and to the distinction between
substance and form .I7B

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Next to Whitney, Hermann Paul exerted the greatest influence on

Saussure. His explanation for the regularity oflanguage change likewise
directed Saussure's attention to synchronic linguistics. 179 Paul's Princi-
ples of the History of Language insisted that "clear views as to the con-
ditions of the life oflanguage" were necessary for establishing "a thor-
oughly trustworthy basis for historical investigation. ,,180 Paul
distinguished between historical grammar and a "descriptive" branch of
linguistics concerned with the general conditions of language use. The
scholar, in his view, could not "avoid describing states OflangUage" nor
the way individual speech acts contributed to the life of a tongue.
Those aspects of language study that "claim exemption from historical
observation" included "general reflections upon the individual employ-
ment of language, and about the relation of the individual speaker to
the general use of language."IHI Paul's conception of linguistics as a
double science was an important toundation tor Saussure's distinction
between diachronic and synchronic language study.182
The proper object of linguistic study was for Paul a sequence of
"linguistic states" (Zustande), each of which was governed by the use
of language "at a given date within a certain community. ,,183 He recon-
structed an underlying system of speech, comparable to Saussure's
langue, that evolved historically but could not be understood with ref-
erence to origins or genealogy alone. Descriptive linguistics, as Paul un-
derstood it, explored the "general usage of language" (allgemeinen
Sprachusus).184 The linguist analyzed the "entire sum of the products of
the linguistic activity of the entire sum of individuals in their reciprocal
relations." Ideally this field considered "all the groups of sound ever
spoken, heard, or represented, with the associated ideas, whose symbols
they were; all the numerous relations entered into by the elements of
speech in the minds of individuals." But Paul conceded that a "gulf"
existed between one's powers and the possibilities. ISS Linguists could at
most "obtain a certain average, by which the strictly normal part oflan-
guage-namely, its usage is defined. ,,186
The dichotomy between language usage and the individual's lin-
guistic expression (parole) emerged as one of Saus sure's main concerns.
He took an opposing view to Paul, insisting that langue was indepen-
dent of individual speech. For Saussure language as a system was not
complete in the individual; it existed only in the multitude. Langue and
parole were separate objects of research. 187 Paul's focus on the individ-
ual reflects his own grounding in psychology, as well as his dispute with

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the comparative psychologists Steinthal and Lazarus. Paul insisted that

"every linguistic creation is always the work of one single individual
only.,,188 The representatives of VOlkerpsychologie had mistakenly applied
the laws governing the psychical process of the single mind to nations.
According to Konrad Koerner, Saussure's insistence that language was
independent of the individual and external to her was an overreaction
to Paul's contention that language could only be observed in the indi-
vidual speaker. He recognized difficulties in Paul's position and favored
a sociological approach over the psychology of the individual. IB9
Significantly, Paul asserted that individual speakers always had an
unconscious impact on language. He allowed little consideration of the
will and intention behind linguistic activity. All linguistic formulations
had an "involuntary character" in Paul's analysis. They were "created
without preconceived intention, at all events without an intention of
establishing anything lasting, and without consciousness on the part on
an individual of his creative activity. ,,190 Individual linguistic activity af-
fected language use. But the "forces at work" that ultimately shaped
the general conditions for the life of language "flow[ ed] from this dark
chamber of the unconscious in the mind. ,,191 The physical organs of
speakers, as well as psychical processes of association and analogy, de-
termined how language was produced and evolved historically.
The French philologists with whom Saussure resided for ten years
after leaving Leipzig reserved a more assertive role for the speaking
subject. Saussure had joined the Societe de linguistique de Paris before
leaving Geneva; soon after arriving in the French capital in 1880 he be-
came its assistant secretary charged with writing summaries of biweekly
meetings. Michel Breal arranged for Saussure to be appointed lecturer
in Germanic languages, Sanskrit, Latin, Farsi, and Lithuanian at the
Ecole pratique des hautes etudes. Since the 1860s and especially fol-
lowing the Franco-Prussian war ofl870, French linguists had been dis-
tancing themselves from the German masters under whom many had
trained. The extent to which figures such as Breal, Gaston Paris
(1839-1903), and Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) shaped Saussure's
disaffection with historicism is debated. Hans Aarsleff insists that Breal
gave Saussure's "new linguistics its fresh French cast" and resurrected
an eighteenth-century concern for representation and signification. 192
Koerner counters that French influence on Saussure's general theory of
language was "slight, if not negligible. ,,193 Saussure did not present any
portion of the later Course in Paris, and his students did not pursue the

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precepts of his synchronic linguistics. 194 Regardless of Breal's direct im-

pact on Saussure, his concerns reveal the disfavor into which German
linguistics was falling internationally by the late nineteenth century.
The son of French Jewish emigres, Michel Breal was born in
Rhenish Bavaria but returned to Alsace when his father died in 1837.
His early career was dedicated to establishing a German school of com-
parative philology in France. Breal had studied Sanskrit with Bopp and
Albrecht Weber in Berlin and made his reputation by translating the
former's Comparative Grammar into French in 1866. Bopp, according
to Breal, had rightly dispelled the "mysticism" of the Romantic fascina-
tion with India and first developed the principle of uniformitarianism,
assuming language was always subject to the same laws and basic con-
ditions. Bopp had also refused to succumb to the excessive naturalism
of Schleicher, whose Compendium Breal opted not to translate. 195 In
the 1870s the French scholar increasingly turned against comparative
German philology, however, raising concerns shared by Whitney about
the conditions of language change. His inaugural lecture at the College
de France faulted German comparativists for a "purely external study of
words."I96 A focus on origins and evolution had detached form from
meaning, as if language scholars merely documented "a fourth natural
realm" devoid of human intention. 197 Breal imagined language to be a
semiotic system and proposed like Whitney that signs were both arbi-
trary and conventional.
For Breal conscious, rational agents were the source of linguistic
change. Observers should recall that "language is a human act; it has
no reality outside of human activity.... Everything in language comes
from man and is addressed to man. ,,198 He coined the term "semantics"
in 1883 to describe the discipline that explored how speakers created
linguistic meaning and engaged in processes of signification. For Breal,
speech was "foremost a means of communication"; "our speech or-
gans" were "at the service of our thinking and only convey what is
going on in the mind. ,,199 The evolution oflanguage thus depended on
the activities of speakers and hearers as they gave meaning to the world
and sought to be understood.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, linguists at-
tempted to restore to speakers a portion of the agency that compara-
tive-historical philology denied them. The difficulty of explaining lin-
guistic change over time compromised the autonomy of language as an
entity presumably driven by its own internal laws. Scholars trained in

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 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

the German tradition raised problems of meaning and signification in

the 1870s, questioning the Neogrammarian focus on original forms
and their evolution through time. Saussure's resurrection of the sign
and his concern for processes of signification followed, in this sense, a
broader trend. His work evolved as part of an internal reaction to the
historicization of language within Germany that considered language
to be a social institution and means of communication. Neogrammari-
ans and their critics alike were on the cusp of creating a quasi-struc-
turalist science of language states when Saussure took on the project.
Saussure assumed a professorship in the history and comparison
ofIndo-European languages at the University of Geneva in 1891. Not
until 1906, however, did he offer the lectures on "general linguistics"
for which he is famed. Saussure delivered three courses on the topic be-
fore 1911. Unlike other scholars responding to the German historical
tradition, Saussure did not emphasize the free will and autonomy of
speaking subjects. Rather, the "militant anti-humanism"loo of which
structuralism has been accused, can be tied to his subsuming individual
speakers to the vagrancies of a linguistic system. Structuralism and its
disregard for the subject ironically emerged out of the quintessential
humanist discipline, philology. Saussure returned questions of repre-
sentation to the heart oflinguistics, while radically curtailing the semi-
otic agency of individual~. Signs were arbitrary and their value de-
pended on a temporally fixed set of linguistic relations. Language, in
his model, preserved its autonomy and destabilized the human subject.
Starting in 1870, Saussure recalled in the Course, Whitney and the
Neogrammarians began to investigate "the principles that govern the
life of languages. ,,201 He credited his predecessors with dismantling or-
ganicist metaphors and depicting language instead as "a product of the
collective mind of linguistic groups." Yet Saussure feared that the fun-
damental problems of general linguistics still awaited solution. 202 The
Course sought to rectifY the methodological flaws plaguing compara-
tive-historical philology by defining the object of linguistic inquiry.
This, according to Saussure, included "all manifestations of human
speech" (langage)20.' and could be broken down into two distinct enti-
ties: language proper (langue) and speaking (parole). The separation of
these key terms followed from Saussure's conception of the basic speak-
ing-circuit. The execution of a particular speech act was, in his view, al-
ways individual, willful, and intellectual. Speaking or parole allowed a
person to combine linguistic units uniquely so that she might express

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her thoughts. It was a psychophysical process that could never be stud-

ied in its totality given its inevitable heterogeneity.
The "social crystallization of language" presented Saussure with
the true object of linguistic study. Like Whitney and Paul, he assumed
language was foremost a "social product. ,,204 Langue resembled a gen-
eral "storehouse" filled by the members of a linguistic community; it
contained the "grammatical system" and the "sum of word-images"
present in their minds. Saussure assumed for this reason that language
was never "complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within the
collectivity.,,205 He defined langue more specifically as a "self-contained
whole," a homogeneous "system of distinct signs corresponding to dis-
tinct ideas. ,,206 This system could be studied independently of all other
aspects of natural language. It had its own internal arrangement and
rules that remained untouched by individual acts of speaking.
Autonomy was a defining characteristic of language in Saussure's
conception. The system he envisioned was, for one, not "affected by
the will of the depositaries,,,207 either as individual speakers or a com-
munity. Participants could never "create or modifY" langue on their
own; speakers merely assimilated a system of signs passively and made
use of it without premeditation. 2oB The arbitrary nature of the linguis-
tic sign likewise contributed to this autonomy, as Saussure imagined it.
He followed Whitney in assuming that "language is a convention and
the nature of the sign that is agreed upon does not matter. ,,209 But Saus-
sure did not share the American's confidence that ready-made ideas ex-
isted before words. In his view, signs did not unite a thing and a name,
but a concept and a sound-image. And the bond uniting the pair was
entirely unmotivated. The arbitrary nature of the sign was, on the one
hand, the result of Sa ussure's recognizing the historicity oflanguage. 2lo
Sound and meaning were in constant flux; the particular combination
of signified and signifier shifted according to contingent historical pro-
21]
cesses.
On the other hand, Saussure denied that the signified possessed
an essential internal core that might stand outside of time and resist
change. The meaning of any given word was not predicated on its ety-
mology, but rather on its location within the system of language cur-
rently available to speakers. Language states were "determined by
nothing except the momentary arrangement of terms. ,,212 The signified
existed only in relation to a signifier whose meaning depended on its
relative position within the larger system of language. For this reason

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 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

the sign had to be studied at the moment of its articulation and as a

point of intersection within a particular synchronic state. Laws of sound
change and other historical realities never affected a given system as a
whole; the evolution of specific linguistic elements had to be studied
outside the totality. Saussure therefore strictly separated synchronic and
diachronic approaches to linguistics. For him, the science of language
states could succeed "only by completely suppressing the past.,,213 To
interpret language as a product of its own genealogical development
wrongly denied the self-sufficiency of the system.
The arbitrariness of the sign did not convey creative choice upon
the speaker, however. Unlike Locke, Saussure did not regard language
as "a contract pure and simple," a "rule to which all freely cunsent. ,,214
Neither individuals nor the community could "modifY" or "control the
linguistic sign.,,215 Despite appearances, it was effectively fixed and im-
mutable with respect to the users of language. Signs resisted arbitrary
substitution because a given language state was "always the product of
historical forces.,,216 The power of tradition prohibited willful change
and replacement. The arbitrary nature of the sign likewise protected it
from any attempts at modification. Speakers had no "reasonable basis"
for evaluating the appropriateness of a sign because the signified existed
solely in conjunction with an arbitrary sound-image. 217 An individual
could not present arguments for substituting a freely chosen sign as the
more natural or correct designation.
The purely relational identity of the sign rendered the structure of
language self-sufficient. For Saussure, language was "a system of pure
values.,,218 The meaning of signs was relational, a factor of their ties to
other elements in the linguistic system. Scholars of language should
therefore approach language as they would a game uf chess. The value
of a linguistic unit, like that of a game piece, was made up "solely of re-
lations and differences with respect to ... other terms. ,,219 Only the si-
multaneous presence of other elements bestowed value on a given sig-
nifier. Sallssure concluded that "language is a form not a substance.,,220
Its component parts were based entirely on relations of identity and dif-
ference, calculated formally without regard for what might be consid-
ered the substantial or material content of the signifier. He identified
two specific types of relationships that existed in a language-state: asso-
ciative and syntagmatic. Both gave value to linguistic units based on an
internal framework of binary opposites.
Saussure's rejection of nomenclaturism bestowed autonomy on

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language as a system for creating meaning. "There are no pre-existing

ideas," Saussure explained, "and nothing is distinct before the appear-
ance of language.,,221 Specifically, Saussure imagined language and
thought as two parallel domains, both originally "shapeless and con-
fused." The "floating realm of thought" existed alongside "phonic sub-
stance." The "indefinite plane of jumbled ideas" was "equally vague"
as the "plane of sounds" until language provided demarcation. Lan-
guage, for Saussure, was not a "mold"; it did not create "a material
phonic means for expressing ideas." Rather, language "serve[ d] as a
link between thought and sound" delimiting units of both. The choice
of a given "slice of sound" to name a given idea was completely arbi-
trary; neither had a foundation outside the relative framework provided
by language. But Saussure insisted that thought and sound were as in-
separable as the recto and verso of a sheet of paper. The structures of
language gave form to thought in a similar manner: the observer could
"neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound. ,,222
Knowledge, by implication, was always particular to the system of iden-
tity and difference that governed the interaction oflinguistic units. The
relative value of linguistic signs set the parameters for thought, and
there was no escaping the structures of the system.
Saussure's perspective on the autonomy oflanguage differed sub-
stantially from the view of earlier comparativists, yet its implications for
the speaking subject were equally severe. August Schleicher imagined
the life and growth of national tongues transpiring in complete isola-
tion from human beings. Languages, in his view, followed an internal
principle of development that remained unchanged from the first mo-
ment of its inception. Renan and Friedrich Max Muller likewise as-
sumed that linguistic conventions determined the thought patterns and
cultural practices of human communities. Language actively shaped the
human experience by presenting a grammar that united members of a
nation. Even Steinthal and the Neogrammarians, who attempted to
recognize the contributions of speakers, concluded that language
change occurred in an unconscious realm. Hidden psychological and
physiological mechanisms influenced the origin and evolution of na-
tional tongues. In these cases, the authority of a language derived from
its historical continuity. Origins remained a formative moment in these
narratives, creating habits of thought and behavior that nations and
human subjects could not escape.
The structuralist model of Ferdinand de Saussure dissolved the

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 SPEAKERS AND SUBJECTIVITY

agency of speakers in a synchronic field. Human beings ceased to be

transcendental subjects with the potential to operate outside of a lin-
guistic system. There was no privileged center from which the knowing
subject could survey a metaphysical or empirical reality. From a struc-
turalist perspective, the subject is neither sovereign nor self-sufficient;
she is defined by a system of relations whose very existence escapes her
gaze. The play of difference and the multiplicity of linguistic relations
create subject positions that individuals subsequently inhabit. m This
perspective undermined traditional Western notions of the subject. As
Jonathan Culler has argued, a whole tradition of discourse about hu-
manity had taken the self as a conscious subject that endowed the world
with meaning. Saussure displaced the sovereign subject from its func-
tion as center or source. Speakers were dissolved into a set of interper-
sonal systems that worked unconsciously through them. The self was
no longer identified with a unified, homogeneous consciousness, but
with the unintended result of conventional systems of relation. There is
thus no attempt within structuralism to achieve empathetic under-
standing or to reconstruct a situation as it might have been consciously
grasped by an individual subject. 224
Saussure's perspective detached language from perceived human
essences, whether national, racial, moral, or ontological. Structuralism
overturned the remnants of an expressive theory of language, in which
national tongues were guided by the spirit and proclivities of speakers.
According to Saussure, correlating language with an essential being
succumbed to the very type of organicism he sought to avoid by "as-
suming that the 'genius' of a race or ethnic group tends constantly to
lead language along certain fixed routes."m Saussure dismissed as
"largely an illusion" the prospect of reconstructing the cultural life of
human communities based on archaic linguistic states. 22 1> Language, in
his view, did contribute to a sense of "ethnic unity" (ithnisme), but
only to the extent that this entailed a "social bond. ,,227 Words did not
point to shared cultural origins and common genealogical descent.
Rather, the discursive function oflanguage encouraged communities to
engage in the same religions, governmental, and cultural practices.
Both Saussure and Nietzsche helped reinstitute the study of lan-
guage as a central concern of the human sciences. Saussure proposed a
new science of semiology designed to examine "the life of signs within
society.,,228 Linguistics provided the "master-pattern for all branches of
semiology" because, in Saussure's view, language was "the most com-

281
 CHAPTER 6

plex and universal of all systems of expression.,,229 This perspective

opened a new avenue for understanding human subjects and the laws
of social interaction. During the 1950s and 1960s Saussurian-inspired
structuralism became a prominent intellectual movement in France,
though not in Germany, after Levi-Strauss suggested that all social
practices could be interpreted as circuits of signification and exchange.
Language and culture were analogous, in his view. Both were complex
systems for creating meaning that relied on signs, relations of exchange,
and the negotiation of identity and difference.
Nietzsche likewise reinstated rhetoric as a principle concern of the
modern human sciences. He is responsible for displacing philosophy
with discourse analysis as the architectonic discipline of the twentieth
. L anguage, 10
century. 2~O . h'IS VIew,
. c. .
lLlOctlone d as a "pnson-
. h ouse, ,,231
proscribing historically contingent yet temporally fixed systems of relat-
ing ideas, signs, and the material world. For Nietzsche the aesthetics of
the metaphor detached words and concepts from their referents so that
language remained autonomous of all it represented. He likewise sus-
pected that the transcendental subject was a grammatical fiction, a mi-
rage emanating from a subject-predicate sentence structure. Yet, unlike
Saussure, Nietzsche held open the possibility of salvaging a playful,
postmodern subject who, once rid of her illusions, embraced the cre-
ative potential oflanguage. Transforming the practice of genealogy into
a tool of liberation, he demonstrated to Foucault and other poststruc-
turalists how one might break the spell of discursive conventions.
A concern for the constructive powers of language was the logical
conclusion of the comparative philological tradition. Nietzsche and
Saussure were both heirs to a century-long tradition of language study
in Germany that had in the course of extensive empirical research de-
veloped a strikingly modern appreciation for the way words and gram-
matical structures shape knowledge, human communities, and cultural
identity. Their radical critique of subjectivity is rooted in a linguistic tra-
dition that is neither as French nor as postmodern as often assumed.
The rise of autonomous language in nineteenth-century Germany
helped set the stage for the linguistic turn of twentieth-century France.
 Conclusion

T he French comparativist Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) echoed the

sentiments of Ernest Renan when he affirmed in 1923 that German
scholars had erected "a solid edifice in comparative grammar." Up to
this point, he argued, Germans had dominated the field of linguistics
"in very large part." Yet Meillet believed this tradition showed "signs
of decline" in the early twentieth century. Comparative philology re-
sembled a "machine fatigued by extended use," one that had "lost its
profitability. ,,1 Himself trained in comparative Indo-European studies,
Meillet insisted that any explanation oflinguistic change must approach
language as a social phenomenon. German scholars had erred in assum-
ing language was "a being that existed for itself, independently of the
people who employed it." Outsiders to the tradition had recently rein-
troduced the speaker into considerations of language, and Meillet ex-
pected "new voices" soon to "emancipate" linguistics from its German
heritage. Among other things, he admonished, students should con-
sider a new field of "general linguistics" that was emerging from the
work ofW. D. Whitney and Ferdinand de Saussure. 2
By the end of World War I, German linguistics had lost its inter-
national preeminence to various forms of European structuralism and
to the United States as an emerging center for research on language. 3
The field ultimately failed to integrate and respond to the two most in-

283
 CONCLUSION

novative critics it had itself produced. German scholars did not fail to
recognize the significance of Saussure as a linguistic theorist. The
Course on General Linguistics was immediately reviewed and often cited
in German literature; it was even assimilated into interwar neo- Kantian
"organicist" linguistics. 4 Yet the sober, methodological form of struc-
turalism that took root in Germany was often dismissed as a continua-
tion of positivism and thus lacking in social significance. 5 German crit-
ics treated Saussure with "indifference" and displayed little sensitivity
toward the methodological implications of structuralist principles, pre-
ferring a historical approach to language. 6 Not until 1931 was the
Course actually translated into German. Discussion of Saussure as a
foundational thinker was far more prevalent in Geneva, Copenhagen,
and Prague than in German cities and universities. German linguists
generally assumed that structuralism broke away from a native tradition
of linguistic investigation that grew out of Herder, Humboldt, and
Grimm. In their view, the characteristically French focus on language as
a tool of communication was more amenable to structuralism than the
German appreciation of language as a living force uniting members of
the Vole In truth, a German tradition of linguistic thought had at least
in part produced Saussure after itself challenging the primacy of the
Volksgeist as a mechanism for explaining change over time.
Nietzsche's evocation of language in the dismantling of illusory
systems of truth and totality likewise found little reception among his
German devotees. The fin-de-siecle German avant-garde enlisted
Nietzsche in salvationist projects of cultural and political redemption
very distinct from the deconstructive visions of later followers. In the
early twentieth century Nietzsche inspired transvaluative programs of
regeneration designed to overcome an impending sense of nihilism.
This focus on creative, positive reconstruction precluded serious en-
gagement with Nietzsche's canonical texts on language. s The philo-
sophical implications of his linguistic work did not gain a more serious
audience for another fifty years. Under the custodianship of Elisabeth
Forster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche's early legacy was also annexed by the
most extreme, anti-Semitic members of the po/kisch, eugenicist, and
A1ldeutsch nationalist movements. These circles ironically transformed
Nietzsche into a prophet of Aryan racism and a purified and de-Ju-
daized German Christianity: The alternative concepts of language of-
fered by Saussure and Nietzsche found far greater resonance among so-

284
 CONCLUSION

cial scientists, literary scholars, and philosophers in France and the

United States, especially after the second world war.
German language scholars resisted the challenge Saussure and
Nietzsche posed to the origin paradigm that had dominated compara-
tive philology through most of the nineteenth century. Instead, the var-
ious fields of philology and linguistics gravitated, as Suzanne Marchand
has shown, toward a deepening historicism and toward an illiberal, neo-
Romantic fascination with cultural particularism. 10 The German univer-
sities were a center of conservatism and reaction after World War I, hos-
tile to the Weimar Republic and the encroaching forces of modernism
and democratization; classical philologists, especially, feared irrelevance
as political commentators and national cultural mentors. I I Political
commitments alone, however, cannot explain the relative German ne-
glect of Saussure and structuralism. The notion of language existing as
a synchronic system was compatible after World War I with allegiance
to a fascist state, racism, and ideological nationalism, just as it could
support an egalitarian notion of a social order without internal hierar-
chies. 12 However, resuming the search for origins and appealing to the
vital force of the Volksgeist enabled German language scholars to re-
assert more effectively the cultural relevance of a field increasingly
drawn into conservative and National Socialist circles under the Weimar
Republic and Third Reich.
The academic fields presiding over the points of origin from
which nineteenth-century philologists traced German descent contin-
ued their search for a national cultural essence. In the 1890s Gcrman-
ists integrated various neo-idealist methodologies that arose in reaction
to positivism into their exploration of national literature. This entailed,
on the one hand, distinguishing a supposedly inward, vital, metaphysi-
cally oriented German soul from the technical, rational, and urban so-
ciety ascribed to western civilization. 13 On the other hand the new tleld
of Volksktmde encouraged German philologists to consider how land-
scape' blood, soil, and the legacy of the ancient Germanic tribes had
shaped cultural production. This perspective bound the problem of ori-
gins directly to considerations of racial and ethnic descent. August
Sauer, for example, professor of German philology in Prague, sought
"new evidence" for evaluating German literature in "the previously un-
fathomed depths of the most authentic tribalism" and in the physical
reality that gave it form. 14

285
 CONCLUSION

Under the dual pressure of postwar pessimism and cultural histor-

ical specialization, German classicists abandoned the ideal of aristo-
cratic, universalist humanism in exchange for a similar historicism. A
universal definition of Kultur as the sum of human achievement was
gradually replaced by the model of Kulturen, organically conceived cul-
tures each driven by an instinctive will to form. 15 During the Wil-
helmine period, the progressive and cosmopolitan aspects of J. G.
Herder's thoughts were similarly distorted into a national chauvinism
bordering on racism, retroactively transforming Herder into a prophet
of militant nationalism. II> A nea-Romantic appreciation of Greek cul-
ture and religion emphasized ritual and subrational aspects of Greek
life, increasingly distancing German classicists from more social-scien-
tific scholars in Britain and France. 17 The field of Indology also gravi-
tated toward a neo- Romantic concern for mysticism, art, spiritualism,
and aestheticism after World War I, while criticizing the stringent meth-
ods of text-critical analysis that had dominated classical philology. IS
Comparativists once again entered the debate on the likely loca-
tion of the Indo-European Urheimat after research on the topic had
dwindled in the climate of sober positivism that characterized the
Neogrammarians. Archaeologists, prehistorians, and scholars of race re-
opened the problem; linguists joined the fray riding the coattails of
these popular disciplines and challenging their authority to interpret
origin myths. 19 Advocates of]ocating the Urheimat in northern Europe
drew National Socialist racial theory into linguistic scholarship, while
prominent representatives of the central Asian thesis tended to be per-
secuted under the Third Reich. 20 Both sides of the debate, however,
tapped into what Clemens Knobloch terms the "purity imperative of
origin myths" and upheld the fundamental intersection of language,
race, and Volk. 21 By contrast, in 1939, the structuralist Nikolai Trubet-
zkoy (1890-1938), a Russian linguist and friend of Roman Jakobson
in the Prague school, declared the problem of locating the Indo- Euro-
pean homeland invalid; it was ridiculous, in his view, to seek the primal
seat of an entity that never existed and for which solid evidence could
never be found. 22
Even the notorious Houston Stuart Chamberlain (1855-1927)
laid claim to comparative philology in his immensely popular Founda-
tions of the Nineteenth Century (1899), declaring his age to have been
the "century of philology." Published in German, the racist tract
sought legitimacy and a gloss of erudition in the "safety anchor" pro-

286
 CONCLUSION

vided by philology. According to Chamberlain, Indologists had "un-

earthed buried possessions of mankind" testifYing to the "genuine in-
dividuality" of the Aryan race and its Germanic vanguard. Their knowl-
edge of the deep Indo-European past exploded the "myth of the
peculiar aptitude of the Jew for religion," while intensifYing the "belief
in our strength" and "our independent capacity for much that is of the
highest. ,,13 Chamberlain claimed philological support for his obscene
vision of a Germanic religion in which Jesus was "morally" a Jew, but
Aryan by race. 24 Chamberlain mobilized the field of philology within a
radical cult of Germanism that gave credence to Nazi racism and may
have predisposed readers to join the NSDAP.25
Linguistic research itself was dominated in Germany by the vari-
ous national philologies and their viilkisch-organicist rhetoric through
the first half of the twentieth century.26 General linguistics did not earn
its independence as a fully professionalized field with its own institu-
tional structures until the 1950s. Thus, language scholars needed train-
ing in a specific area of cultural history or literary analysis, usually In-
dology, in order to receive a full professorship; even in the 1920s it was
impossible to habilitate exclusively as a linguist. Most people with an
interest in linguistics styled themselves as philologists and regarded
their research as an aid or instrument in historical analysis. 27 German
language scholars did follow the broader turn-of-the-century European
and American trend to interpret language within a social framework
and as part of communicative practice. Only in Germany this most
often resulted in language appearing as an expression of national or eth-
nic identity and in scholars researching culturally articulated linguistic
practice with the aid of other disciplines, such as Volkskunde. 2B German
linguistics focused not on the totality of language as a synchronic sys-
tem, but on the importance of language within a totality composed of
Geist, Volk, and Kultur. 29
A new vitalist and organicist school of linguistics dominated Ger-
man universities from 1918 to 1945, and the type of historicism it ad-
vocated stood in direct opposition to both Nietzsche and Saussure.
These linguists rejected the apparent atomism, materialism, and
methodological individualism of the late nineteenth century, focusing
instead on collectivity and proclaiming language to be energy, force,
and the foundation of a dynamic world order. At the start of the cen-
tury Karl Vossler, a student of Romance languages, led a generational
revolt against the perceived positivism of the Neogrammarians, fearing

287
 CONCLUSION

that in their specialization and expertise they had sacrificed national

cultural leadership for the minutiae of science. An approach to lan-
guage that was synthetic, spiritual, organic, and German was to provide
new relevance to a discipline threatened by the onslaught of realism,
the natural sciences, and technical advance. 3D Scholars such as the Ger-
manist Hennig Brinkmann held language to be an autonomous life
force that renewed and regenerated the nation by reanimating tradi-
tional forms. 31 Each linguistic fact could be placed in relation to a latent
order that detined the totality of a language and in turn the spirit,
worldview, and culture of the national collective. 32 This perspective
drew on a Humboldtian tradition of regarding language as ene'I'Eeia,
but for vitalist scholars the nation had expanded beyond the notion of
linguistic community designated by the Romantic concept Volk to in-
clude a pronounced racial dimension. 33
The German linguists who came of age after World War I rejected
the biological materialism of the Neogrammarians and stood opposed
to physical or materialist theories of race. The Jew who spoke and
wrote perfect German symbolized for Nazi theorists how insecure the
relationship between language and race was; individuals could pass all
too easily from one native tongue to another. As Christopher Hutton
argues, language scholarship under National Socialism was not charac-
terized by a conflation of linguistic and racial categories but by a par-
ticular attitude toward the gap between language and ties of blood and
kinship. Linguists under the Third Reich assumed a collective act of will
was required to maintain the appropriate links between language, race,
ethnicity, and heritage. A volkisch "cult of the mother tongue" was to
prevent language and race from drifting further apart. 34 The impossibil-
ity of mapping linguistic genealogies onto parallel conceptions of bio-
logical descent had been apparent by the mid-nineteenth century. Nazi
scholars of Yiddish did not speculate on the likely origin and descent of
eastern European Jews. lnstead they mapped the spread of Yiddish as a
dialect and criticized its speakers for an "unhealthy" attitude toward
preserving the mother tongue. 3S Recognizing disparate origins for lan-
guage and race could equally have resulted in linguists assuming that
the conscious adoption of German nationality was a choice open to any
individual regardless of perceived racial heritage.
The National Socialist mobilization of origin motifs more closely
resembles a suspect form of historical citation than the natural out-
growth of a nineteenth-century linguistic tradition. Historicism in lin-

288
 CONCLUSION

guistics and reference to the Volksgeist as a driving force of linguistic

change had otten served to unsettle existing political structures and
challenge religious orthodoxies, just as Aryan racial theory could have
liberal or progressive applications. In the nineteenth century the study
of language as a field tended to attract more liberal and cosmopolitan
thinkers away from the traditional national philologies and theology
due to the often destabilizing implications of comparative-historical
analysis. The linguists who came of age in the Wilhelmine and
post-World War I eras differed from their predecessors in an often re-
actionary use of tropes and concepts introduced in the Romantic pe-
riod. In 1932 the Celticist Leo Weisgerber thus claimed his generation
was "renewing piece by piece" Humboldt's project and finally defining
the nation based on language as Herder and Grimm had wished. For
Weisberger, this continuity gave German linguistics its "vitality"
(Lebenskraft).'6 Evoking memories of the early nineteenth century be-
stowed legitimacy on an increasingly radical vOlkisch perspective while
self-consciously linking an increasingly aggressive militaristic state with
an earlier, more benign form of cultural nationalism.
Defining the nation as a homogeneous linguistic community
united by virtue of its members' "pure" descent from a single point of
origin was, nevertheless, a problematic proposition from the start.
When taken as a marker of national genealogy and as evidence of un-
tarnished ethnic descent, language could be mobilized to exclude per-
ceived minorities from the German nation. A historical appreciation of
linguistic meanings and structures could morc easily be used to rein-
force a quasi-biological understanding of cultural identity being trans-
mitted through the mother tongue. Assigning a formative role to ori-
gins and relative autonomy to inner principles of linguistic growth
likewise tended to privilege the Volksgeist or other national essence as
determining patterns of thought and interaction. By contrast, the no-
tion of a discursive community composed of speakers who freely wield
linguistic signs in the service of mutual exchange would seem to em-
phasize the autonomy and agency of individual participants. When
placed in the constellations as such ideas assumed in the first half of the
twentieth century, the German tradition of linguistic thought could be
mustered in support ofa criminal regime. This, however, was not a nec-
essary outcome and not the only legacy of comparative philology.
Following World War II, the theories of language developed by
Ferdinand de Saussure and Friedrich Nietzsche reemerged to inspire

289
 CONCLUSION

social scientists and philosophers west of the Rhine River. As a project

for rejuvenating the social sciences in the 1950s, structuralism built
upon the theory of signs developed in the Course; for a diverse group
of anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and literary critics, lan-
guage became an analogy for other aspects of human life. Structuralists
were united by their common adoption of concepts from Saussurian
linguistics and a concurrent methodological privileging of underlying
rules over events. By contrast, greater reception of Nietzsche's thought
distinguished a younger generation of poststructuralists in the later half
of the 1960s who, following Michel Foucault, sought to reopen ques-
tions of history and subjectivity, while retaining their predecessors'
concern for the workings of linguistic and systemic forces. J7 The alter-
native French legacy of comparative philology stressed the autonomy
of language and pursued the implications this had for the process of
subject formation and for individual agency. In every respect, struc-
turalists and poststructuralists extended the criticisms Saussure and
Nietzsche had launched against the paradigm of formative origins in
linguistic thought.
That linguistics became the paradigmatic human science in post-
war France ironically hinges on a delayed reception of Saussure. Mter
World War I Russian and Swiss scholars dominated the field of struc-
turalist linguistics. Not until the mid-1950s did modern linguistics
enter the French university, where the comparative Indo- Europeanist
Antoine Meillet dominated the scene; even then structuralist linguistics
remained very marginal and only lay siege to Paris and the Sorbonne
gradually from the provinces. 38 The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss
first learned of Saussure from Roman Jakobson, a leading figure in Rus-
sian formalism, during his wartime exile at the New School for Social
Research in New York City. The feverish activity that surrounded the
reception of structuralist linguistics in early-1960s France, as well as the
ingenuity with which it was applied to the human sciences, relates to
this tardiness. France had likewise been cut off from the linguistic turn
in analytic philosophy, unaware of the Vienna school that had nurtured
Ludwig Wittgenstein and been bypassed as its representatives sought
refuge from National Socialism in Anglo-Saxon countries:w
Structuralist linguistics offered the possibility of achieving a new
form of objectivity and rationality in a series of sciences perceived as
lacking formalism. 4u Instead of trusting how individual subjects created
meaning, structuralism as a method aimed to uncover the subcon-

290
 CONCLUSION

scious, buried, yet universal mental structures that made thought pos-
sible and upon which lived experience, culture, and society were built.
These hidden structures were believed to constitute an independently
existing order of reality, and their laws could be known with scientific
precision. To this end, Saussure's understanding of the language system
provided a model. Levi-Strauss thus believed the structures of kinship
systems, totems, and myths mimicked language; Roland Barthes as-
serted in 1964 that all sign systems were already language systems; and
Jacques Lacan conceived of the unconscious as being structured like a
language. Following Saussure, structuralists envisioned these complex
systems existing as a network of relationships that united and linked
their various elements. Nothing in the system had an intrinsic meaning
or identity; the significance of any given item was determined relation-
ally among other elements, and the meaning of signs could be deter-
mined objectively. What a given sign designated was thus less important
than how it fit into a larger symbolic order.
This perspective resulted in a self-conscious departure from a tra-
ditional "humanist" appreciation of subjectivity and historicity, espe-
cially as most recently represented in French existential phenomenol-
ogy. In the context of postfascist and postcollaborationist Europe, the
notion of an autonomous, unified subject capable of choice and self-de-
termination had been a powerful mechanism for grappling with ques-
tions of responsibility. Structuralism undermined the idea of a transcen-
dental subject capable of perpetual self-fashioning and privileged
knowledge, countering that deep linguistic processes actually con-
structed the self at a level beneath consciousness. For this reason, the
advent of structuralism has often been linked to a conservative turn in
French intellectual life and in French politics under Charles de Gaulle's
Fifth Republic. Disenchanted with political activism, the reality of Rus-
sian communism, and any new ideological commitments, intellectuals
gravitated to what Levi-Strauss called a cooler temporality of rules,
codes, and structures. 41 Structuralism offered disengagement from ex-
istential Marxism's model of the committed intellectual. For this rea-
son, it was perhaps less appealing in postwar Germany, where con-
fronting history and preserving the autonomy of subjects as ethical
agents was more imperative.
In the last chapter of The Savage Mind (1962), Levi-Strauss thus
questioned the assumptions Jean-Paul Sartre made about the absolute
freedom of transcendent consCiousness and the privileged status of

291
 CONCLUSION

human beings as historical agents. For Levi-Strauss the "ultimate goal

of the human sciences" was "not to constitute, but to dissolve man."
Human beings had to be integrated back into the objective structures
of nature so they could be studied "as if they were ants. ,,42 In his view,
historical subjects were merely surface phenomena, a mirage of sorts
hovering above a deeper reality. Sartre's belief that human beings
forged their own existence as masters of history was, from an anthro-
pological perspective, a local and contingent form of self-perception; it
was equivalent to the myths of "savages" in that it revealed more about
imperial power relations in the present than fundamental truths about
reality. Language, for Levi-Strauss, was likewise not an instrument for
the self-creation of free subjects, but a realm independent of human
agency. Speakers did not freely endow linguistic signs with meaning.
Rather, language was "human reason which has its reasons and of
which man knows nothing. ,,43 Saussure's linguistics had prepared this
perspective by divesting signs of stable, external reference points in sub-
jective intention or material reality.
In his most structuralist phase Michel Foucault also rejected the
humanist assumption that man was an active, conscious subject of his-
tory. The Order of Things (1966) proposed that the recent centrality of
man conceived as an autonomous subject was merely an illusion and
historicized the manner in which the illusion took shape, especially in
the nineteenth century:4 Man, in Foucault's view, was "a recent inven-
tion" and "one perhaps nearing its end. ,,45 His work detailed how
human subjects had been produccd and constituted by a succession of
linguistic regimes that had determined at various points in history what
entailed valid knowledge. The patterns or codes that had governed em-
pirical analyses oflabor, life, and language set the parameters of the his-
torical worlds that humans inhabited. For Foucault, human agency was
subsumed within larger patterns of defining or categorizing reality.
Language set these grids in a discursive realm that paid little heed to
external referents or realities. Thus, once the modern episteme began
to crumble, Foucault wagered, "man would be erased, like a face drawn
in the sand at the edge of the sea. ,,46
Friedrich Nietzsche's approach to language provided a useful
foundation for what Foucault described as his life work: creating a ge-
nealogy of the modern subject. 47 In the Order of Things, he credited
Nietzsche with returning "language ... into the tleld of thought di-
rectly"; he had been "the tlrst to connect the philosophical task with a

292
 CONCLUSION

radical reflection upon language." At the start of the nineteenth cen-

tury, Foucault surmised, language had become "detached from repre-
sentation"; this revealed language as an "enigmatic multiplicity that
must be mastered." Nietzsche, in turn, opened up a "philosophical-
philological" space from which to reassemble the "tragmented being of
language" into a new synthesis: s His questioning the representational
accuracy of language allowed Foucault to shift the focus of his own
analysis away from what was said toward considerations of power, for
example, who spoke and the reasons that gave rise to what was said. It
was supposedly in the "possessor of the word" that language would be
gathered together in its entirety:9 Foucault's own philological exami-
nation of discourse likewise borrowed from Nietzsche,so as did the as-
sumption that language as a semi-autonomous agent shaped thought
patterns and the formation of subjects.
A renewal of philosophy, especially as was inspired by Nietzsche,
helped define the shift toward poststructuralism within French circles
after 1966. 51 Increasingly, Foucault saw in Nietzsche's view of subject
formation a model for addressing the problem of individual agency
without succumbing to Sartrean subjectivism. His notion of genealogy
also allowed Foucault and other poststructuralists to raise the question
of history, which had been dismissed by the emphasis on synchronic
analysis within structuralism. s2 Language had been central to Nietz-
sche's contributions in both these areas and remained so for poststruc-
turalists. These scholars rejected the presumption of totality and closure
that characterized the structuralist approach to language. In their view,
the underlying structures that made meaning possible were not fixed;
the relationships among elements in a society, culture, or text were con-
stantly being reworked and negotiated. By undermining the formative
quality of origins, Nietzsche drew attention to the contingencies and
power struggles that shaped the formation of subjects and discourses in
history. He suggested that the meaning of a sign was not stable, but in-
stead constantly being produced, proliferated, undermined, and con-
tested. The political implications of this position were potentially am-
biguous, with possibilities for both emancipatory cultural engagement
and a reactionary dismissal of ethics in the name of relativism.
In his inaugural lecture at the College de France (1970), Foucault
presented three concepts of language that he believed underlay recent
approaches to philosophy. Each of these he rejected for its apparent
complicity in eliding the "reality of discourse" as an "event" central to

293
 CONCLUSION
the articulation and contestation of power and to the constitution of
human subjects. Three misleading assumptions about language had
helped disguise the will-to-power as a will-to-truth. First, belief that a
speaker "directly animat[ ed] the empty forms of language with his
aims" supported the "philosophy of the founding subject." In this
view, man "grasps by intuition the meaning lying deposited within
[empty things]" and freely disposes of signs, marks, and traces. Sec-
ondly, the opposing theme of "originating experience" proclaimed that
"things are already murmuring meaning which our language has only
to pick up." The conditions of possibility for speaking of and in the
world were thus "a primordial complicity with the world." The third
attempt to discover rationality within the workings of language ap-
peared to place discourse at the center of the philosophical enterprise,
but at heart attributed an essentializing "consciousness of self" to aU
things. The idea of "universal mediation" allowed language to "ele-
vate[] particularities to the status of concepts"; but it assumed that
things and events "unfold[ ed] the secret of their own essence" as they
took form in language."
The constructivist understanding of language that itself underlies
Foucault's philosophy has deep roots in nineteenth-century Germany.
Language scholars had by the fin-de-siecle unraveled the three pre-
sumptions Foucault dismissed in his inaugural lecture for wrongly re-
taining faith in the stability of prelinguistic points of reference. The
Order of Things identified only a few, and not necessarily the most im-
portant, of the comparative philologists and language scholars that be-
stowed autonomy on words and grammatical structures starting in the
late eighteenth century. Foucault's self-declared genealogy should not
be dismissed as entirely fictitious, however, despite its near teleological
neglect of historical contingency and contemporary concerns. Starting
in the late eighteenth century, theologically inspired Protestant theo-
rists, including J. G. Hamann and J. G. Herder, translated the notion
of God's living word into an appreciation of language as an indepen-
dent organism; national tongues were imagined to build communities
of people united by the force of common origins and shared thought
patterns. This perspective could potentially undermine the agency of
speaking subjects, depicting individuals themselves as being formed by
the structures and historical whims oflanguage.
The supposed "death of man" within nineteenth-century German
reflections on language was, however, never absolute. For Nietzsche

294
 CONCLUSION

and Foucault, as for Hamann, Herder, Grimm, and their followers, rec-
ognizing the contingency oflinguistic forms was also a precondition for
ctfective action, offering a strategic advantage in the reconstruction of
alternative communities, new knowledge, and more potent forms of
subjectivity. The philologist who broke through the deceptions of lan-
guages that claimed transparency simultaneously wielded the power to
direct them in his own image. In this respect, the shadow of Babel ex-
tended only so far over nineteenth-century language scholarship. The
ambition to master language in the diversity ofits historical and cultural
tcxms ultimately withstood the cautions of a God troubled by human
conceit.

295
 Notes

Introduction

I. Ernest Renan, "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de ]eunesse," in Oeuvres Com-

pUtes de Ernest Renan, ed. Henriette Psi chari (Paris: Calmann-Levy,
1947-58),2:865-66.
2. Ernest Renan, L'Avenir de la Science, Pensees de 1848 in Oeuvres Com-
pletes, 3:841, 845.
3. Renan, L'Avenir de la Science, 3:830.
4. Renan, L'Avenir de la Science, 3:832-33.
5. Renan, L'Avenir de la Science, 3:821.
6. Renan, L'Avenir de la Science, 3:839, 847.
7. Rcnan, L'Avenir de la Science, 3:832.
8. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in
an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1991),4.
9. In the early 18605, for example, the German emigre scholar Friedrich
Max Muller delivered his lively Lectures on the Science of Language to
substantial crowds in London.
10. Ernest Renan, "Les Etudes Savantes en Allemagne," in Oeuvres Com-
pletes, 1:186, 182.
11. See Olga Amsterdamska, Schools of Thought: The Development of Linguis-
tics from Bopp to Saussure (Boston: D. Reidel, 1987); and Hans Arens,
SprachlVissenschaft: Der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike his zur
Gegenwart(Munich: Karl Alber, 1955).
12. For a discussion of this relationship see Indra Sengupta, From Salon to
Discipline: State, University and Indology in Germany, 1821-1914 (Hei-

297
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

delberg: Ergon, 2005).

13. The term Ursprache referred to an original, first language from which
other languages were derived. It could be the lost "mother" tongue of a
specific family, comparable to Proto- Indo-European, or the divine first
language of revelation spoken before Babel.
14. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philol-
ogy in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
15. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,
Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),51-63.
16. George Williamson, The Longingfor Myth in Germany: Religion and Aes-
thetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 16.
17. A recent exception to this includes David Hoyt and Karen Oslund, eds.,
Language Study and the Politics of Community in Global Context (New
York: Rowland & Littlefield, 2006). Most histories oflinguistics are con·
cerned with the provenance of scientific "discoveries," the formation of
schools, and questions of influence. Comparative-historical philology is
often regarded as a founding moment in the emergence of the modern,
scientific discipline. Classic histories of the field include Theodor Benfey,
Geschichte der Sprachrvissenschaft und orientalischen Philologie in Deutsch-
land (Munich: J. G. Cotta Buchhandlung, 1869); Berthold Delbri.ick,
Einleitung in das Sprachstudium: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und
Methodik der vergleichenden Sprachforschung (Leipzig: Breitkopf und
Hartel, 1880); and Holger Pedersen, Sprogvidenskaben i det nittende
Aarhundrede (1924), translated into English by John Webster Spargo as
Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century: Methods and Results (Cam·
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931). Other early histories
written by distinguished linguists include Rudolfvon Raumer, Geschichte
der germanischen Philologie vorzugsrveise in Deutschland (Munich: R.
Oldenbourg, 1870) and Vilhelm Thomsen, Geschichte der Sprachwiss-
enschaft bis zum Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts: Kurzgefasste Darstellung
der Hauptpunkte, trans. Hans Pollak (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1927). More
recent surveys include Amsterdamska, Schools of Thought; Arens, Sprach-
lVissenschaft; Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Mein-
ungen iiber Ursprung und Vietfalt der Sprachen und Volker (Stuttgart:
Anton Hiersemann, 1958-63; David Cram, Andrew Linn, and Elke
Nowak, eds., History of Linguistics, vol. 2, From Classical to Contempo-
rary Linguistics (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999); Andreas Gardt,
Geschichte der SprachlVissenschaft in Deutschland (New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 1999); R. H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (New York:
Longman, 1990); and James Stam, On the Origin of Language: The Fate

298
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

ofa Question (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). More concerned with
the history of ideas are Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on
the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Roy Harris and Talbot J. Taylor, Land-
marks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saus-
sure (New York: Routledge, 1989). Historians of science have also writ-
ten on the "parasite tendency" of linguistics to borrow scientific models
from (and lend them to) botany, anatomy, geology, and evolutionary
theory. See, for example, Henry M. Hoenigswald and Linda F. Wiener,
Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An Interdisciplinary
Perspectil'e (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); and
Konrad Koerner, ed., Linguistics and Evolutionary Theory: Three Essays by
August Schleicher, Hrnst Haeckel, and Wilhelm Bleek, vol. 6 of Amsterdam
Classics in Linguistics, 1800-1925 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1983).
18. Historians distinguish broadly between a state-centered model of citizen-
ship typical of France and Britain and an ethnocultural vision of nation-
hood, which was based on an ideal of linguistic unity and took root east
of the Rhine River. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 51-63;
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
19. See Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism; Brubaker, Citizenship and
Nationhood in France and Germany.
20. Bernhard Giesen, Intellectuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a
German Axial Age, trans. Nicholas Levis and Amos Weisz (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 71-72, 83-84.
22. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 51-58.
23. See, for example, Werner Besch, "Dialekt, Schreibdialekt, Schriftsprache,
Standardsprache: Exemplarische Skizze ihrer historischen Allspragllng
im Deutschen," in Dialektologie: Ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allge-
meinen Dialketforschung, ed. Werner Besch et aI., 2:961-90 (New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 1983).
24. Andreas Gardt, ed., Nation und Sprache: Die Diskussion ihres Verhiiltnisses
in Geschichte und Gegenwart (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000); and
Claus Ahlzweig, Muttersprache-Vaterland: Die deutsche Nation und
ihre Sprache (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994).
25. Michael Townson, Mother-Tongue and Fatherland: Language and Poli-
tics in Germany (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992).
26. Martin Jay, "Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflec-
tions on the Habermas-Gademcr Debate," in Modern European Intellec-
tual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra

299
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 87-90.

27. Jay, "Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn?" 89.
28. Martin Jay acknowledges precedents to the "linguistic turn" in the Ger-
man theologians Johann Gottfried Hamann and Friedrich Schleierma-
cher, who did associate language and thought. But he characterizes them
as "relatively isolated figures"; the powerful idealist movement had little
use for the irrational hermeneutics of Hamann and his followers. See Jay,
"Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn?" 87,90.
29. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities:
Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century
Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986).
30. Anthony J. La Vopa, "Specialists against Specialization: Hellenism as Pro-
fessional Ideology in German Classical Studies," in German Professions,
1800-1950, ed. Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad ]arausch, 27-45 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990); and R. Steven Turner, "The Growth of
Professional Research in Prussia, 1818 to 1848-Causes and Context,"
Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 137-82.
31. Robert S. Leventhal, "The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the
German States, 1770-1810," Isis 77 (1986): 243-60; and R. Steven
Turner, "Historicism, Kritik, and the Prussian Professoriate,
1790-1840," in Philologie und Hermeneutik im neunzehnten Jahrhun-
dert: Zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. Hel-
mut Flashar, Karfried Grunder, and Axel Horstmann, 2:450-89 (Gottin-
gen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979).
32. See Andreas Kilcher, Die Sprachtheorie des Kabbala als iisthetisches
Paradigma: Die Konstruktion einer asthetischen Kabbala seit der Fruhen
Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998).
33. Quentin Skinner, "Moral Ambiguity and the Art of Persuasion in the
Renaissance," in Proof and Persuasion: Essays on Authority, Objectivity,
and Evidence, ed. Suzanne Marchand and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Brepols,
1996),26.
34. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H.
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
35. Skinner, "Moral Ambiguity and the Art of Persuasion," 41.
36. Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian
England, 1600-1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
37. Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and
Subjectivity ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 21.
38. Shugar, Renaissance Bible, 45. Sec also Wolf Peter Klein, "Christliche
Kabbala lind Linguistik orientalischer Sprachen im 16. Jahrhundert: Das
Beispiel von Guillaume Postel (1510-1581)," Beitriige zur Geschichte
der Sprachwissenschaft 11 (2001): 1-26.

300
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

39. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship,

Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 90ff
40. Jonathan Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 234.
41. John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and
Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004), xxi.
42. See Douglas Kibbee, "Theorie Iinguistique et droits humains linguis-
tiques: perspectives tirees de I'histoire des communautcs linguistiques en
France," in DiversCite, electronic journal of the Universite du Quebec a
Montreal (1998); and "The 'People' and Their Language in 19th-cen-
tury French Linguistic Thought," in The Emet;gence of the Modern Lan-
guage Sciences: Studies on the Transition from Historical-Comparative to
Structural Linguistics in Honour of E. F. K. Koerner, ed. Sheila Emble-
ton, Hans-Josef Niederehe, and John E. Joseph, 111-28 (Philadelphia:
John Benjamins, 1999).
43. This provided the inspiration for Darwin's theory of species differentia-
tion. See Stephen Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language,
Race, and N atuml Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999).
44. Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997),8; and Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narra-
tive, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999),70.
45. See, for example, Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language,
trans. James Fentress (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 7ff.
46. On the Romantic "spiral" of historical development sec M. H. Abrams,
Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Liter-
ature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
47. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 76-100 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
48. Toews, Becoming Historical, xxi.
49. Anthony Grafton, "Invention of Traditions and Traditions ofInvention
in Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius ofViterbo," in The
Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton
and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 31.
50. Jonathan Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 233.
51. Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation
in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1992), 106-8.
52. Markus Hundt, cCSpracharbeit» im 17. ]ahrhundert: Studien zu Georg
Philipp Harsdorffer, Justus Georg Schottelius und Christian Gueintz (New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000),4.

301
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

53. See Sara Smart, "Justus Georg Schottelius and the Patriotic Movement,"
Modern Language Review 84 (1989): 95.
54. See Rolf Schneider, Der Einflufl von Justus GeOl:g Schottelius auf die
deutschsprachige Lexikographie des 17./18. Jahrhunderts (New York: Peter
Lang, 1995); and Stefan Sonderegger, "Zu Grimmelshausens Bedeu-
tung fUr die detusche Sprachgeschichte," in Wahrheit und Wort:
Festschrift fur Rolf Tarot zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Gabriela Scherer and
Beatrice Wehrli, 427-35 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1996).
55. See Wolfgang Huber, Kulturpatriotismus und Sprachbewufltsein: Studien
zur deutschen Philologie des 17. Jahrhunderts (New York: Peter Lang,
1984).
56. Smart, "Justus Georg Schottelius," 97.
57. Huber, Kulturpatriotismus und Sprachbewufltsein, 237.
58. Hundt, «Spracharbeit" im 17. Jahrhundert, 4.
59. On print culture and the public sphere see Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State,
and Civil Suciety in Germany, 1700-1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1996); and Ian McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing: German
Civil Society in the Making, 1790s-1820s (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2003).
60. E. M. Butler, The Tyranny ofGruce over Germany (New York: Macmill-
Ian Company, 1935); Robert Holub, Heinrich Heine's Reception of Ger-
man Grecophilia: The Function and Application of the Hellenic Tradition
in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
1981); and Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and
Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996).
61. See Uwe Puschner, Die viilkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiser-
reich: Sprache, Rasse, Religion (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge-
sellschaft, 2001).
62. Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist
Ideas in Europe, trans. E. Howard (London: Chatto & Heinemann for
Sussex University Press, 1974) and George Mosse, Toward the Final
Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig,
1978).
63. See Olender, Languages of Paradise.
64. Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nine-
teenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001),7.
65. James J. Sheehan, "What Is German History? Reflections on the role of
the Nation," Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 1-23.
66. Roger Chickering, "Language and the Social Foundations of Radical
Nationalism in the Wilhelmine Era," in 1870/71-1989/90: German

302
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

Unifications and the Change of Literary Discourse, ed. Walter Pape,

61-78 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993).
67. Rainer Kipper, Der Germanenmythos im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Gottin-
gen: Vandenhocck & Ruprecht, 2002).
6H. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-
ences, trans. R. D. Lang (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970),282,233.
69. Historians of linguistics have taken Foucault's account of comparative
historical philology quite seriously. Brigitte Schlieben-Lange, for exam-
ple, supports his notion of a radical epistemic break in linguistic thought
around the year 1800. See Ideologie: Zur Rolle der Kategorisierungen im
Wissenschaftsprozess (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000); and "Uberlegun-
gcn zur Sprachwissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung," in Europdische
SprachlVissenschaft um 1800: Methodologische und historiographische
Beitrdge zum Umkreis der "ideologie," ed. Brigitte Schlieben-Lange,
Hans-Dieter Draxler, Franz-Josef Knapstein, Elisabeth Boick-DuffY, and
Isabel Zollna, 11-24 (Munster: Nodus, 1989).
70. Foucault, Order of Things, 297.
71. Foucault, Order of Things, 386.
72. Foucault, Order of Things, 384.
73. Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle
(Princeton: Princeton University Press), xii.
74. See, for example, the discussion in David West, An Introduction to Con-
tinental Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 154ff.
75. Charles Taylor, Hegel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978),
18-21.
76. Lia Formigari, Signs, Science and Politics: Philosophies of Language in
Europe, 1700-1830, trans. William Dodd (Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
1993), 187.
77. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure; Ulrich Rieken, Linguistics, Anthropology,
and Philosophy in the French Enlightenment, trans. Robert E. Norton
(New York: Routledge, 1994); Brigitte Nerlich, Change in Language:
Whitney, Breai, and Wegener (New York: Routledge, 1990).
78. Konrad Koerner, Practicing Linguistic Historiography, (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 1989); Sheila Embleton, John E. Josepf, and Hans-Josef
Niederehe, eds., The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences: Studies
on the Transition from Historical-Comparative to Structural Linguistics
in Honour of E. F. K Koerner, vol. I Historiographical Perspectives
(Philadelphia: John Bcnjamins, 1999).

Chapter 1

I. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Fragmente der Monographie uber die

303
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

Basken" (1801/2), in Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, ed. Albert Leitz-

mann et al. (Berlin: B. Behr, 1903-36),7:599-602.
2. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Uber Denken und Sprechen" (1795/96),
in Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, 7:582-83.
3. Humboldt, "Fragmente der Monographie iiber die Hasken," 7:60l.
4. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Grundziige des allgemeinen Srpachtypus,"
n.d., in Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, 5:214.
5. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Ankundigung einer Schrift: uber die vaskische
Sprache und Nation, nebst Angabe des Gesichtspunctes und Inhalts der-
selben" (1812), in Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, 3:29l.
6. See Humboldt's discussion of American languages in "Grundziige des
allgemeinen Srpachtypus," 5:164ff.
7. This has been noted by Jere Paul Surber in Metacritique: The Linguistic
Assault on German Idealism, ed. Jere Paul Surber (Amherst, N.Y.:
Humanity Books, 2001), 4l.
8. Rieken, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Philosophy, 71-73,177.
9. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 104ff.
10. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, "Unvorgreiffliche Gedancken, betreffend die
Ausiibung und Verbesserung der Teutschen Sprache," in History of Lin-
guistics: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century German Linguistics, ed.
Christopher M. Hutton (London: Routledge, 1995), 1:255,257-58.
II. Gottfried Wilhlem Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans.
and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996),49,50.
12. Talbot r. Taylor, Mutual Misunderstanding: Skepticism and the Theoriz-
ing of Language and Interpretation (Durham: Duke University Press,
1992),32.
13. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 408.
14. Leibniz suggested that humankind's original vocabulary might have been
based on an aesthetic harmony between words and things or on a sound
symbolism that was lost through time. Christopher M. Hutton has
argued that Leibniz shared a Kabalistic belief about the hidden truths
found in combinations of letters and was willing to consider that sounds
could be independent bearers of meaning (introduction to History of
Linguistics, 1 :xvi). See also Lia Formigari, Signs, Science and Politics,
187.
15. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 720-21.
16. Rieken, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Philosophy, 76-77.
17. It is a stretch to suggest that Locke sowed the seeds of Romanticism by
claiming that national languages reflect or even determine the way the
members of that linguistic group think. In Locke's view, word choice was
an individual act; it was not communities of speakers who chose to

304
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

attribute a particular sign to an idea. But he did awaken the eighteenth

century's interest in the origin of language and in the interdependent
historical evolution of language and cognition. See Harris and Taylor,
Landmarks in Linguistic Thought, 113, 118-19.
18. See Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 335, 345--46.
19. On rationalist tendencies in Locke's thought see Ricken, Linguistics,
Anthropology, and Philosophy, 78, 140.
20. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowl-
edge, Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understand-
ing, ed. Robert G. Weyant (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles &
Reprints, 1971), 11.
21. Ricken, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Philosophy, 174ff; Formigari, Signs,
Science and Politics, 187.
22. Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 5lff, 173.
23. Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 61.
24. Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 298.
25. Ricken, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Philosophy, 179-80.
26. Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 283ff.
27. Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 325--41.
28. Ricken, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Philosophy, 104; Harris and Taylor,
Landmarks in Linguistic Thought, 131.
29. Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 253.
30. Harris and Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought, 131-34.
31. Hans Aarsleft~ "The Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great," History
of the Human Sciences 2 (1989): 195.
32. Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sci-
ences in the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),
234.
33. Terrall, Man Who Flattened the Earth, 250, 233.
34. Aarslcff, From Locke to Saussure, 178-86.
35. Condillac himself responded to this question in book 3 of his Cours dJe-
tudes pour l'instruction du Prince de Parme. See Aarsleff, From Locke to
Satlssure, 189.
36. Ricken, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Philosophy, 185-87.
37. Nouveaux Memoires de l'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belle-Lettres
(1770) (Berlin: Chretien Frederic Voss, 1772),25.
38. Aarsleft~ From Locke to Saussure, 189.
39. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge,
ed. Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5, 3,
6.
40. Johann David Michaelis, A Dissertation on the Influence of Opinions on
Language, and of Language on Opinions (New York: AMS Press, 1973),

305
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

35.
41. Michaelis, Dissertation on the Influence, 2-3.
42. Michaelis, Dissertation on the Influence, 10.
43. Michaelis, Dissertation on the Influence, 33.
44. Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2002), 29ff.
45. For example, Michaelis argued that stories surrounding the term "celes-
tial manna" indicated that the linguistic conventions of Middle Eastern
tongues had distorted religious truth. Both the Arabs and the Hebrews
claimed that the substance miraculously supplied as food to the children
of Israel during their progress through the wilderness came from heaven
or "tell." Scripture associates manna with dew. And, Michaelis feared,
Moses had obscured that the substance was "no more than a gum exud-
ing from plants" when he made use ofIsraelite expressions that wrongly
held that dew "came from above" not from the earth. According to
Michaelis, "the Jews in Jesus' time went still farther, making this error a
handle to disparage the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves." Rec-
ognizing errors in the metaphors associated with dew in Arabic and
Hebrew and subsequently transferred to manna would confirm Chri5t's
claim that the bread Moses gave his children did not come from heaven.
Michaelis, Dissertation on the Influence, 55-56.
46. Jonathan Sheehan argues that Michaelis's translations of scripture in-
tended to evoke "vertigo" in readers. See The Enlightenment Bible,
206ff.
47. Michaelis, Dissertation on the Influence, 12.
48. Johann Gottfried Herder, On the Origin of Language: Two Essays, trans.
Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 151.
49. James c. O'Flaherty, Johann Georg Hamann (Boston: Twayne Publish-
ers, 1979), 136.
50. James c. O'Flaherty, The Quarrel of Reason with Itself: Essays on
Hamann, Michaelis, Lessing, Nietzsche (Columbia, s.c.: Camden House,
1988), 135.
51. O'Flaherty, Quarrel of Reason with Itself, 171.
52. Johann Georg Hamann, "Aesthetica in Nuce: Eine Rhapsodie in kabbal-
istischer Prose," in Hamann, Siimtliche Werkc, ed. Josef Nadler (Wupper-
tal: R. Brockhaus, 1999), 2:211; O'Flaherty, Q;tarrel of Reason with
Itself, 63-64.
53. O'Flaherty, Quarrel of Reason with Itself, 115.
54. Hamann, "Aesthetica in Nuce," 2:197.
55. Robert E. Norton, Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment
(Cornell University Press, 1991),65.
56. Johann Georg Hamann, "Des Ritters von Rosencreuz letzte Willenserk-

306
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

Hirung tiber den gottlichen und menschlichen Ursprung der Sprache," in

Sdmtliche Werke, 3:32.
57. Hamann, "Aesthetica in Nuce," 2:206.
58. Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to
Fichte (Cambridgc, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 17.
59. F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Lei-
den: Brill, 1973),240.
60. James C. O'Flaherty, Unity and Language: A Study in the Philosophy of
Johann Georg Hamann (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1952),19.
61. O'Flaherty, Unit..v and Language, 19.
62. Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur
Henkel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1955), 1:393.
63. Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Georg Hamann's, des Magus in Norden,
Leben und Schriften, ed. Karl Hermann Gildemeister (Gotha, F. A.
Pcrthes, 1863-75), 5:122.
64. Hamann, Johann Geor;g Hamann)s, 5:7.
65. Hamann, Briefwechsel, 7: 173.
66. Johann Georg Hamann, "Tagebuch eines Christens," in Sdmtliche
Werke, 1:52.
67. Johann Georg Hamann, "Versuch tiber eine akademische Frage," in
Siimtliche Werke, 2:121-26.
68. Hamann, "Versuch tiber eine akademische Frage," 2:122.
69. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Ueber die neuere Deutsche Literatur: Erste
Sammlung von Fragmenten," in Herder, Herders Siimtliche Werke, ed.
Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: G. Olms, 1967), 1:148-49.
70. Norton, Herder's Aesthetics, 94.
71. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Ueber die neue Deutsche Literatur: Erste
Sammlung von Fragmenten, 2. Ausgabe," in Herders Sdmtliche Werke,
2:12-17.
72. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 187.
73. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 195.
74. Herder, On the Origin of Language, 87.
75. Herder, On the Origin of Language, 103, 108-10.
76. Herder, On the Origin of Language, 101.
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among
Men," in The Essential Rousseau, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: New
American Library, 1975), 157-62.
78. Kurt Mtiller-Vollmer, "Von der Poetik zur Linguistik-Wilhelm von
Humboldt und der romantische Sprachbegriff," in Univcrsalismus und
Wissenschaft im Werk und Wirken der Bruder Humboldt, ed. Klaus Ham-
macher and John Pickering (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 12.

307
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

79. Herder, On the Origin of Language, 109.

80. Herder, On the Origin of Language, 138.
81. Herder, On the Origin of Language, 117.
82. Herder, "Uber den Ursprung der Sprache," in Herders Siimtliche Werke,
5:146.
83. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Abschiedspredigt, Biickeburg, 1769," in
Herders Siimtliche Werke, 31:125.
84. Arnd Bohm, "Herder and the Politics of Adamic Language," In Herder
Jahrbuch, ed. Karl Menges, Regine Otto, and Wulf Koepke (Stuttgart: J.
B. Metzler, 2000), 21-32.
85. In the essay Origin of Language (1781), a text written as an unpublished
addendum to the Discourse, which Herder could not have known,
Rousseau argued that humans did not invent language as a tool to meet
specific needs. Primitive language was expressive, not utilitarian; it was
"due not to need but passion." Like Herder and Hamann, Rousseau
believed the earliest Middle Eastern and Asian languages must have been
highly figurative, sensuous, and poetic, designed to express feelings not
rational ideals. The first tongues were those of poets; only with increas-
ing grammatical sophistication had their musical, rhythmic, and melodic
qualities later been silenced. See Rousseau, "Discourse on the Origin,"
11-13.
86. Dae Kweon Kim, Sprachtheorie im 18. Jahrhundert (Saint Ingbert:
Rohrig, 2002), 147ff.
87. Herder, "Uber den Ursprung der Sprache," 5:37-38.
88. Herder, "Uber den Ursprung der Sprache," 5:155.
89. Taylor, Hegel, 13ff.
90. Herder, "Ueber die neuere Deutsche Literatur," 1:151.
91. Herder, "Ueber die neue Deutsche Literatur," 2:13.
92. Herder, "Ueber die neuere Deutsche Literatur," 1:152-55.
93. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit," Herders Siimtliche Werke, 9:348.
94. Herder, "Ueber die nelle Deutsche Literatur," 2:12-13.
95. Herder, "Ideen," 9:358, 363.
96. Herder, "Ideen," 9:343, 346.
97. Herder, "Ideen," 9:141.
98. Herder, "Ideen," 9:363.
99. Herder, "Ideen," 9:348.
100. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Briefe zu Beforderung der Humanitat," in
Herders Siimtliche Werke, 17:287.
101. Herder, "Ueber die neue Deutsche Literatur," 2:13.
102. Herder, "Ueber die nelle Deutsche Literatur," 2:14.
103. Herder, "Ideen," 9:364-65.

308
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

104. Herder, "Ideen," 9:365.

105. French, for example, was often mistaken as a derivative of Celtic, not
Latin, because of the two languages' mutual reliance on word order, not
morphology, to construct meaningful sentences. See Robins, Short His-
tory of Linguistics, 185-87.
106. Robcrt L. Miller, The Linguistic Relativity Principle and Humboldtian
Ethnolinguistics (The Hague: Mouton, 1968),95.
ID7. Pietro Perconti, Kantian Linguistics: Theories of Mental Representation
and the Linguistic Transformation of Kantism (Munster: Nodus, 1999),
13[ See also Jurgen Villers, Kant und das Problem der Sprache: Die his-
torischen und systematischen Grunde fur die Sprachlosigkeit der Transzen-
dentalphilosophie (Constancc: Verlag am Hockgraben, 1997).
108. Surber, Metacritique, 53.
109. Johann Georg Hamann, "Metakritik uber den Purismum der Vernunft,"
in Siimtliche Werke, 3:286.
lID. Hamann, "Mctakritik," 3:286.
Ill. Surber, Metacritique, 14-19.
112. See Beiser, Fate of Reason, 40.
113. Hamann, "Metakritik," 3:286.
114. Beiser, Fate of Reason, 43.
115. Surber, Metacritique, 86.
116. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft," in
Herders Siimtliche Werke, 21 :31.
117. Herder, "Metakritik," 21:25.
118. Surbcr, Metacritique, 13.
119. Perconti, Kantian Linguistics, 24f.
120. Perconti, Kantian Linguistics, 24ff.
121. Perconti, Kantian Linguistics, 6ltT.
122. Anthony]. La Vopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy,
1762-1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Prcss, 2001),192-93.
123. Formigari, Signs, Science and Politics, 172-73.
124. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, "Von der Sprachfahigkcit und dem Ursprunge
der Sprache," Siimtliche Werke, ed. 1. H. Fichtc (Berlin: Vcit, 1846),
8:301.
125. Fichte, "Von der Sprachfahigkeit," 8:304-5.
126. Starn, On the Origin of Language, 182; Lia Formigari, "Idealism and Ide-
alistic Trends in Linguistics and in the Philosophy of Languagc," in
Sprachtheorien der Neuzeit I: Der epistemologische ](ontext neuzeitlicher
Sprach-und Grammatiktheorien, cd. Petcr Schmitter (Tiibingen: Gunter
Narr, 1999), 242.
127. Formigari, "Idealism and Idealistic Trends, "242.
128. Starn, On the Origin of Language, 185.

309
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

129. Cited in Starn, On the Origin of Language, 185-86.

130. Isobel Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century
Poetry (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982),4.
131. Fichte, "Von der Sprachfahigkeit," 8:309.
132. Fichte, "Von der Sprachfahigkeit," 8:309.
133. Surber, Metacritique, 30.
134. Helmut Gipper, "Sprachphilosophie in der Romantik," in Sprachphiloso-
phie-Philosophy of Language-la philosophie du langue. Ein interna-
tionales Handbuch-An International Handbook of Contemporary
Research-Manuel international des recherches contemporaines, ed.
Marcelo Dascal, Dietfried Gerhardus, Kuno Lorenz, and Georg Meggle
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 1:216.
135. Karl Heinrich Ludwig Politz (1772-1838), Georg von Reinbeck
(1766-1849), and Vater pursued a theory of language as the external
presentation of internal representations. But their focus on universal
grammar generally excluded them from the university institutionaliza-
tion of linguistics which favored an empirical, comparative-historical
approach. See Perconti, ICantian Linguistics, 61.
136. August F. Bernhardi, Sprachlehre (New York: Georg Ohns, 1973), 1:8.
137. Bernhardi, Sprachlehre, 2:129.
138. Gipper, "Sprachphilosophie in der Romantik," 216.
139. August Wilhlem Schlegel, "Miscellen," in Europa: Eine Zeitschrift, ed.
Friedrich Schlegel (Stuttgart: J. Cotta, 1963),2:193-95.
140. Jiirgen Trabant, "How Relativistic are Humboldt's 'Weltansichten?" in
Explorations in Linguistic Relativity, ed. Martin Piitz and Marjolijn Ver-
spoor, 25-44 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000).
141. Michael Heath, introduction to Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language:
The Diversity of the Human Language-Structure and its Influence on the
Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1988), xxv.
142. Paul R. Sweet, "Wilhelm von Humboldt, Fichte, and the Ideologues
(1794-1805): A Re-Examination," Historiographia Linguistica 15, no.
3 (1988): 361.
143. Miller, Linguistic Relativity Principle, 90.
144. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Uber Denken und Sprechen," in Wilhelm von
Humboldts Werke, 7:582.
145. Formigari, "Idealism and Idealistic Trends," 177.
146. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Uber das vergleichende Sprachstudium in
Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung," in
Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, 4:25.
147. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Grundziige des allgemeinen Spraehtypus,"
Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, 5:252.

310
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

148. Cited in Sweet, "Humboldt, Fichte and the Ideologues," 354.

149. These divisions were replicated in all languages and "flowed ... neces-
sarily and on their own out of the categories of relation." See Humboldt,
"Grundzuge," 5:452.
150. Christian Stetter, "'Uber Denken und Sprechen': Wilhelm von Hum-
boldt zwischen Fichte und Herder," in Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprach-
denken: Symposium zum 150. Todestag, ed. Hans-Werner Scharf (Essen:
Reimar Hobbig, 1989), 36.
151. The extent of Humboldt's debt to J. G. Herder is rightly disputed.
Nowhere does he directly acknowledge the influence of his predecessor,
and textual evidence that might indicate a direct exchange of ideas is
ambiguous. The two families met several times, but without forming any
significant attachment. Sec Sweet, "Humboldt, Fichte, and the Ideo-
logues," 360.
152. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Ueber den Nationalcharakter der Sprachen"
Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, 4:424, 430, 433.
153. Martin L. Manchester, The Philosophical Foundations of Humboldt's Lin-
guistic Doctrines (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985),
104t:
154. Sweet, "Humboldt, Fichte and the Ideologues," 184-87; Manchester,
Philosophical Foundations, 105.
155. Humboldt, On Language, 46.
156. Jeffrey Grossman, "Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Ideology: The
Problem of Pluralism and the Absolute Difference of National Charac-
ter-Or, Where Do the Jews Fit In?" German Studies Review 20, no. 1
(1997): 12; Ruth Romer, Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie in
Deutschland (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985), 153ff.
157. Humboldt, "Grundzuge," 5:428.
158. Heath, introduction, xvii.
159. Humboldt, "Grundzuge," 5:374.
160. Formigari, Signs, Science and Politics, 178.
161. Humboldt, "Grundzuge," 5:374-75.
162. Humboldt, "Grundzuge," 5:377.
163. Formigari, Signs, Science and Politics, 188.
164. Humboldt, "Einkitung in das gesammtc Sprachstudium," in Wilhelm
von Humboldts Werke, 7:622.
165. See Muller-Vollmer, "Von der Poetik zur Linguistik."
166. Humboldt, On Language, 49.
167. Humboldt, "Grundzuge," 5:433.
168. Humboldt, "Grundzuge," 5:387-88.
169. Humboldt, On Language, 21.
170. Heath, introduction, x.

311
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

171. Humboldt, On Language, 112-13.

172. Humboldt, On Language, 216.
173. Manchester, Philosophical Foundations, 129, 133.
174. Manchester, Philosophical Foundations, 131-33.
175. Humboldt, On Language, 216-18.
176. Humboldt, On Language, 216,230.
177. Manchester, Philosophical Foundations, 136-41.
178. August F. Bernhardi, Anfangsgrunde der SprachwissenschaJt (1805),4-7.
179. Formigari, "Idealism and Idealistic Trends," 241.
180. Siegfried J. Schmidt, Sprache und Denken als sprachphilosophischs Problem
von Locke bis Wittgeinstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968).
181. Leventhal, "Emergence of Philological Discourse," 248f.
182. Anthony Grafton, "Polyhistor into Philolog: Notes on the Transforma-
tion of German Classical Scholarship, 1780-1850," History of Universi-
ties 3 (1983): 162-71, 182-83; Vopa, "Specialists against Specializa-
tion."
183. Turner, "Historicism, Kritik, and the Prussian Professoriate."
184. Starn, On the Origin of Language, 187.

Chapter 2

1. Heinrich Julius KJaproth, Geographisch-historische Beschreibung des

ostlichen Kaukasus, zwischen den Fliissen Terek, Aragwi, Kur und dem
Kaspischen Meere (Weimar: Landes-Industrie-Comptoir, 1814),24.
2. In Julius KJaproth, Asia Polyglotta (Paris: ]. M. Eberhart, 1823). Franz
Bopp introduced the term "Indo-European" in his 1857 Ve1;gleichende
Grammatik, and it was adopted by non-German-speaking linguists; he
himself preferred "Indo-Classical" because it recognized the importance
of ancient Greek to the family.
3. The term was lIsed by Friedrich August Pott in "Indogermanischer
Sprachstamm," in Allgemeine Encyklopadie der Wissenschaften und Kiin-
ste, ed. J. S. Ersch and J. G. Gruber, 2nd ser., sect. 18 (Leipzig: J. F.
Gleditsch, 1840),20.
4. Susanne Zantop, for example, has shown South An1erica to have been
the subject of German "colonial fantasies" (Colonial Fantasies: Conquest,
Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 [Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997]); Sheldon Pollack and Jonathan Hess have
argued that Germans colonized Jews as an "other" internal to Europe
(Pollack, "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power beyond the
Raj," in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, cd. Carol A.
Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, 76-133 [Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1993]; Hess, "Johann David Michaelis and the

312
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Radical Anti-

semitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany," Jewish Social Studies 6, no.
2 [20001: 56-10 1); central European involvement in the failing
Ottoman Empire has likewise been depicted as a case of German Orien-
talism sustaining imperial expansion (K. E. Flemming, "Orientalism, the
Balkans, and Balkan Historiography," American Historical Review 105,
no. 4 [2000]: 1218-33).
5. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 55.
6. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 9.
7. Han F. Vermeulen, "Fruhe Geschichte der Volkerkunde oder Ethnogra-
phie in Deutschland, 1771-1791," in Volkerkunde Tagung 1991, ed.
Mattias S. Laubscher and Bertram Turner (Munich: Akademischer Ver-
lag Miinchen, 1994), 1:332-33.
8. Leibniz, "Unvorgreiffliche Gedancken," 1 :278.
9. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, 286.
10. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, 285.
11. August Ludwig Schl6zer, Allgemeine Nordische Geschichte (Halle: Johann
Justinus Gebauer, 1771),291.
12. August Ludwig Schlozer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Histoirie (Gottin-
gen, 1772), 103.
13. Schlozer, Vorstellung seiner UnilJersal-Histoirie, 103.
14. Schl6zer, Allgemeine Nordische Geschichte, 266-85.
15. Jurgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatis-
chen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998),250.
16. On Addung see Ulrich Wyss, Die wilde Philologie: Jacob Grimm und der
Historismus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1979) 96ff.
17. Johann Christoph Addung, Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachkunde mit
dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe in bey nahe funfhundert Sprachen und
Mundarten, vol. 1 (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), xi.
18. Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 132.
19. For an early nineteenth-century account of the history of the compara-
tive scholarship on German and Farsi see Bernhard Dorn, Ueber die Ver-
wandtschaft des persischen, germanischen und griechisch-lateinischen
Sprachstammes (Hamburg: J. A. Meissner, 1827),91-135.
20. Johann Christoph Addung, Aelteste Geschichte der Deutschen, ihrer
Sprache und Litteratur, bis zur VOlkerwanderung (Leipzig, 1806),349.
21. Adelung, Aelteste Geschichte der Deutschen, 351.
22. Sec Otto Schrader, Sprachvel;gleichung und U1:!feschichte: Linguistish-his-
torische Beitriige zur Erforschung des indogermanischen Altertums (Jena:
Hermann Costenoble, 1906), 5.
23. Adelung, Mithridates, 11.
24. William Jones, "The Third Anniversary Discourse on the Hindus," in A

313
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics, ed.

Winfred Lehmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 15.
25. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 39ff.
26. Jiirgen Liitt, "Einleitung," in "Utopie- Projektion-Gegenbild: Indien in
Deutschland," special issue, ZeitschriJt fur Kulturaustasuch 37, no. 3
(1987): 391-93.
27. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1967),3-5, 139.
28. Amos Leslie Willson, A Mythical1mage: The Ideal of India in German
Romanticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1964), 71.
29. Willson, Mythical Image, 50.
30. Othmar Frank, Das Licht rom Orient (Leipzig: Besson, 1808), 21, 31.
31. Heinrich Friedrich Link, Die Unrelt und das Altertum erliiutert durch
die Naturkunde (Berlin: Ferdinand Dtimmler, 1821-22). In the second
edition of this work (1834), Link retracts his claim that Avestan was the
mother of Sanskrit in favor of the thesis that Sanskrit was the language
most closely related to their common mother.
32. Dorn, Ueber die Verwandtschaft des persischen, 12.
33. Sengupta, From Salon to Discipline, 1.
34. Edgar Lohner, ed. Ludwig Tieck und die Bruder Schlegel: Briefe (Munich:
Winkler Verlag, 1972), 135-36.
35. Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi, "The Nationalist Aspect of Friedrich Schlegel's
On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians," in Sanskrit and (Orien"
talism ': Indology and Comparative Linguistics in Germany, 1750-1958,
ed. Douglas T. McGetchin, Peter K. J. Park, and Damodar SarDesai
(New Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 1l0.
36. Peter K. J. Park, "A Catholic Apologist in a Pantheistic World: New
Approaches to Friedrich Schlegel," in Sanskrit and <Orientalism,' 91.
37. Tzoref-Ashkenazi, "Nationalist Aspect of Friedrich Schlegel," llO.
38. Tzoref-Ashkenazi, "Nationalist Aspect of Friedrich Schlegel," 119.
39. Friedrich Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: Ein Beitrag
zur BegrundunlT der Alterthumskunde (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer,
1808),66.
40. Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der lndier, 105, 175.
41. Tzoref-Ashkenazi, "Nationalist Aspect of Friedrich Schlegel," 109.
42. Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 3--4, 16,3 28.
43. Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 38, 35,44.
44. Schlegel. Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 44, 41,50-51,45.
45. Friedrich Schlegel, "Vorlesungen tiber Universalgeschichte," in Kritische
Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernest Behler (Munich: Verlag Ferdinand
Schoningh, 1960),9:17-18,3.
46. Schlegel, "Vorlesungen i.iber Universalgeschichte," 9:12, 17, 19.

314
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

47. Schlegel, Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 180f. and 197f. See also Man-
fred Petri, Die Urvolkhypothese: Ein Beitrag zum Geschichtsdenken der
Spiitaufkliirung und des deutschen Idealismus (Berlin: Duncker & Hum-
blot, 1990), 194-95.
48. Friedrich Schlegel, "Philosophic der Geschichte," in Kritische Ausgabe
seiner Werke, 9:31-49.
49. Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 194.
50. Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 195.
51. Konrad Koerner, "Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Historical-
Comparative Grammar," in Practicing Linguistic Historiography, 285.
52. Sengupta, From Salon to Discipline, 19-24.
53. Sengupta, From Salon to Discipline, 103.
54. Peter P. J. Park, "Return to Enlightenment: Franz Bopp's Reformation
of Comparative Grammar," in Language Study and the Politics of Com-
munity in Global Context, ed. David Hoyt and Karen Oslund (New York:
Rowland & Littlefield, 2006), 62.
55. Salomon Lefmann, Franz Bopp: Sein Leben und seine Wissenschaft, vo!' 1
(Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1891), 10-14.
56. Cited in Lefmann, Franz Bopp, 31.
57. Lefmann, Franz Bopp, 33.
58. Koerner, "Friedrich Schlegel," 285.
59. Franz Bopp, Vocalismus oder sprachvC1;gleichende Kritiken iiber Jacob
Grimm's deutsche Grammatik und Graff's althochdeutschen Sprachschatz
mit Begriindung einer neuen Theorie des Ablauts (Berlin: Nicolaische
Buchhandlung, 1836), 1.
60. Bopp, Uber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung
mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen
Sprache, ed. K. J. Windischmann (Frankfurt: Andrdiische Buchhand-
lung, 1816), 11.
61. Berthold Delbrlick, Introduction to the Study of Language: A Critical
Survey for the History and Methods of Comparative Grammar of the Indo-
European Languages, trans. Eva Channing (London: Trlibner, 1882),
19.
62. Franz Bopp, Uber das Conjugationssystem, 8-9. Emphasis added.
63. Bopp, Uber das Conjugationssystem, 7.
64. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, cd. William Bright, vo!' 2 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992),213-15.
65. Bopp, Uber das Conjugationssystem, 8.
66. R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, cds., Encyclopedia of Language and
Linguistics (New York: Pergamon, 1994), 5:2576tI
67. See Vivien Law, "Processes of Assimilation: European Grammars of San-
skrit in the Early Decades of the Nineteenth Century," in La linguistique

315
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

entre mythe et histoire, ed. Daniel Droixhe (Miinster: Nodus-Publikation,

1993),254-57.
68. Ernst Windisch, Geschichte der Sanskrit Philologie und indischen Alter-
tumskunde (Strassburg: K. J. Triibner, 1917),72,74-76.
69. Park, "Return to Enlightenment," 74-75.
70. For a good analysis of how Bopp's understanding of inflection and Indo-
European roots evolved see Delbriick, Introduction to the Study of Lan-
guage, 3-16.
71. A. W. Schlegel's final appointment to the philosophical faculty in Bonn
was not official until 1822, although he assumed his duties in 1818. See
Sengupta, From Salon to Discipline, 25.
72. A. W. Schlegel, "Ueber den gegenwartigen Zustand der Indischen
Philologie. Geschrieben im Sommer 1819," Indische Bibliothek 1
(1820),22.
73. Windisch, Geschichte der Sanskrit Philologie, 76.
74. Sengupta, From Salon to Discipline, 56.
75. Lefmann, Franz Bopp, 73.
76. Law, "Processes of Assimilation," 257.
77. Delbriick, Introduction to the Study of Language, 17.
78. Franz Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik, iii. The citation is taken from the
preface to the first edition. For a discussion of what Bopp meant by
"physical" and "mechanical," see Delbriick, Introduction to the Study of
Language, 3-16.
79. Delbriick, Introduction to the Study of Language, 18.
80. Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik, 201.
81. Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik, 203.
82. Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik, 196-97.
83. Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik, 198.
84. Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik, 203.
85. Bopp, Vergleichende Zetllliederung des Sanskrit, (Berlin: Druckerei del'
Koniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1824), 14.
86. Delbriick, Introduction to the Study of Language, 31.
87. See Pott's review article "Researches into the Origin and Mfinity of the
Principal Languages of Asia and Europe. By Lieut. Colon. Vans
Kennedy," Jahrbucher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik, no. 8 (July 1832): 61.
88. See the article on Klaproth in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th edition, vol.
8 (1857),105.
89. In Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta.
90. Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta, 35,40.
91. Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta, 42-44.
92. Klaproth, Asia Po~yglotta, 43.
93. Julius Klaproth, "Obersvations sur la critique faite par M. Sam. Lee ... ,

316
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

par M.le baron Silvestre de Sacy," Nouveau Journal Asiatique 5 (1830):

112-13.
94. Pott, "Indogermanischer Sprachstamm," 19. Contemporary scholars
point to the area just north and between the Caspian and Black seas and
trace Indo-European migration bascd on the diffusion of the domesti-
cated horse. On the intersection of linguistics and archaeology in theo-
ries of the Indo-European homeland see Colin Renfrew, Archaeology
and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (London: Pimlico,
1998); J. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeol-
ogy, and Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989); and Katherine
Kress, Indo-European Homeland Hypotheses: A Critical Examination of
Linguistic A1lJuments (Ottawa, 1995).
95. Pott, "Indogermanischer Sprachstamm," 20.
96. Georg Heinrich August Ewald, "Plan dieser Zeitschrift," Zeitschrift fur
die Kunde des Morgenlandes 1 (1837): 7.
97. An account of this trip is published as Reise in den Kaukasus und nach
Georgien unternommen in den Jahren 1807 und 1808, aufVeranstaltung
der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu St. Petersburg, 2 vols.
(Berlin, 1812-14). See also Geographisch-historische Beschreibung.
98. Sergei Ouvaroff, "Projet d'une Academie Asiatique," Etudes de philologie
et de critique. 2nd ed. (Paris: Didot Freres, 1845), 1-48.
99. Klaproth published accounts of these travels in Die russische
Gesandtschaft nach China im Jahre 1805 (Leipzig, 1809), and
"Bemerkungen tiber die chinesisch-russische Grenze, gesammelt auf
einer Reise an derselben, im Jahre 1806," Archiv fur asiatische Litteratur
(1810).
100. Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus
from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
75-77.
101. Christian Martin Frahn, Indications bibliographiques relatives pour la plu-
a
part la litterature historico-geographique des Arabes, des Persans et des
a
Turcs, specialement destinees nos employes et voyageurs en Asie (Saint
Petersburg: Academie imperiale des sciences, 1845), xii.
102. After Frahn's appointment, Czar Alexander I asked Sylvestre de Sacy to
recommend scholars to fill two new positions in Arabic and Farsi at the
Central Pedagogical Institute in Saint Petersburg. The two Frenchmen
engaged were later instrumental in establishing the Oriental Institute for
Translation, which opened in 1823 by the Asian Department of the For-
eign Ministry.
103. Dorn, Ueber die Verwandtschaft des persischen, 12.
104. Dorn, Ueber die Verwandtschaft des persischen, 51.
105. See the works by Bernhard Dorn, Beitriige zur Geschichte der kaukasis-

317
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

chen Lander (Saint Petersburg: Royal Academy of Sciences, 1841-47),

and Beitrage zur Kenntnis der iranischen Sprache (Saint Petersburg:
Royal Academy of Sciences, 1860).
106. Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta, 35.
107. Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta, 40.
108. Klaproth, Reise in den Kaukasus, 2:585.
109. Julius Klaproth, Tableau historique,geographique, et politique du Caucase
et des prOJ'inces limitrophes entre la Russie et la Persie (Paris: Ponthieu et
c., 1827),70.
110. Klaproth, Reise in den Kaukasus, 2:287.
Ill. Schmidt described Mongolian as a field "in which not only no one is
active, but also in which no one has ever broken ground" and noted the
lack of reference materials available in Mongolian and Tibetan, either as
published by Europeans or complied by native speakers. He had to rely
on odd sources such as a Mandschu-Mongolian comparative grammar
composed under Chinese Emperor Kanghi who had done battle with the
Mongolians, or a grammar and dictionary published in Calcutta 1834 by
a Hungarian traveler who had learned Tibetan from a lama. See Isaac
Jacob Schmidt, Grammatik der tibetischen Sprache (Leipzig: Leopold
Voss, 1839), ix-x, and Grammatik der mongolischen Sprache (Saint
Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1831), vii.
112. Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Forschungen im Gebiete der iilteren religiiisen, poli-
tischen und literarischen Bildungsgeschichte der ViJlker Mittel-Asiens,
l'orzuglich der Mongolen und Tibeter (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat dt:r
DDR., 1972), 1-2.
113. Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Grammatik der mongolischen Sprache, vi.
114. Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Forschungen, 28.
115. Wilhlem Schott, Uber die sogenannten Indo-Chinesischen Sprachen inson-
derheit das Siamische (Berlin: Druckerei der koniglichen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1856), 161.
116. Wilhelm Schott, ed., Werke des tschinesischen Weisen Kung-fu-dsu und
seiner Schuler: Zum erstenmal aus der Ursprache ins Deutsche ubersetzt
und mit Anmerkungen begleitet (Halle, Rengersche Verlags-Buchhand-
lung, 1826-32), l:v-vi.
117. Wilhelm Schott, Chinesische Sprachlehre: Zum Gebrauche bei Vorlesungen
und zur Selbstunterweisung (Berlin: Ferdinand Diimmler, 1857), 1-2.
Julius von Klaproth likewise studied Japanese with the help of a Chinese-
Japanese dictionary after meeting a Japanese language teacher in Russia
in 1805-6 at a school created by Catherine II.
118. Heinrich Julius Klaproth, writing as Wilhelm Lauterbach, Dr. William
Schott's vergebliche Ubersetzung des Confucius aus der Ursprache, eine lit-
terarische Betriigerei (Leipzig: Ponthieu, Michelson and Comp., 1828),

318
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

11.
119. Koerner, "Friedrich Schlegel," 280.
120. Gordon Hewes, "Disputes on the Origin of Language," in Sprachphiloso-
ph ie-Philosophy of Language-La philosophie du langage. Ein interna-
tionales Handbuch-An International Handbook of Contemporary
Research-Manuel international des recherches contemporaines, ed.
Marcelo Dascal, Dietfried Gerhardus, Kuno Lorenz, and Georg Megle
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 2:936.
121. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues und ihren Einflufl aUf die geistige Entwicklung des Men-
schengeschlechts, ed. Donatella Di Cesare (Munich: Ferdinand Schoningh,
1998), 378tf.
122. Carl Friedrich Neumann, "Sprache und Schrift der Chinesen," in Asiatis-
che Studien (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1837),4.
123. That the Societe Asiatique in Paris wanted copies of the Sanskrit type that
Bopp had made for the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1824 suggests the
relative strength of German Indology. See Windisch, Geschichte der San-
skrit Philologie, 65, 78.
124. Klaproth, Reise in den Kaukasus, l:v.
125. Thus, when the Indologist Friedrich Max Muller took an Oxford chair
in Sanskrit in 1851, he was struck by the paltry state of Oriental studies
in England. See Patricia Casey Sutcliffe, "F. M. Muller and Dwight
Whitney as Exporters of Nineteenth-Century German Philology: A Soci-
ological Analysis of the Development of Linguistic Theory" (PhD diss.,
University of Texas, Austin, 2000), 93.
126. For August Ludwig Schlozer's coining the term "Semitic languages," see
Justin Stagl, "August Ludwig Schlozers Entwurf einer 'Volkerkunde'
oder 'Ethnographie seit 1772,'" Ethnologische Zeitschrift Zurich 2
(1974),75.
127. Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical
Criticism (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 4ff.
128. See Arno Beyer's summary in Deutsche Einflusse aUfdie englische Sprach-
wissenschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Goppingen: Kummerle Ver-
lag, 1981), 184-86.
129. Wilhelm Gesenius, Ausfuhrlichcs grammatisch-kritischcs Lchwebiiude der
hebriiischen Sprache mit Vewleichung der verwandten Dialekte (Leipzig:
Friedrich Christian Wilhelm Vogel, 1817), x.
130. Wilhelm Gesenius, Geschichte der hebriiischen Sprache und Schrift. Hine
philologische Einleitung in die Sprachlehren und Wiirterbucher der hehriiis-
chen Sprache (Leipzig: Friedrich Christian Wilhelm Vogel, 1815), 13.
131. Gesenius, Geschichte, 25.
132. Gesenius, Geschichte, 19.

319
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

133. Gesenius, Geschichte, 20.

134. Gesenius, Geschichte, 30.
135. See John William Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth
Century: England and Germany (London: Society for Promoting Chris-
tian Knowledge, 1984), 52ff.
136. Williamson, Longingfor Myth, 153.
137. Williamson, Longingfor Myth, 154; and Rogerson, Old Testament Crit-
icism, 29.
138. Williamson, Longingfor Myth, 155.
139. The article is reprinted in Johannes Bachmann, Ernst Wilhelm Hensten-
bu;g: Sein Leben und Wirken (Gtitersloh: Bertelsmann, 1880),2:187.
140. Bachmann, Ernst Wilhelm HenstenbC1;g, 2:177-283.
141. Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 51.
142. Sengupta, From Salon to Discipline, 54-56.
143. Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 92-93.
144. Heinrich Ewald, The History of Israel, trans. Russell Martineau (London:
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1869), 1:50-5l.
145. Ewald, History of Israel, 1:65.
146. Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 97.
147. Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 91.
148. Williamson, Longingfor Myth, 167ff.
149. Levenson, Hebrew Bible, 11-12.
150. Levenson, Hebrew Bible, 14.
151. Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 69lff.
152. Reinhard G. Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsche und der Babel-Bibel-Streit
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994),31-33.
153. Friedrich Delitzsch, The Hebrew Language Viewed in Light of Assyrian
Research (London: Williams and Norgate, 1883), vi.
154. Suzanne Marchand, "German Orientalism and the Decline of the West,"
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145, no. 4 (2001): 473.
155. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 99fT.
156. Peter Freimark, "Language Behavior and Assimilation: The Situation of
the Jews in Northern Germany in the First Half of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury," Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 24 (1979): 173-74.
157. Jacob Toury, "Die Sprache als Problem der jiidischen Einordnung in den
deutschen Kulturraum," in Gegenseitige Einflusse deutscher und judischer
Kultur: Internationales Symposium, ed. Walter Grab (Tel Aviv, 1982),
82-86.
158. Cited in Toury, "Sprache als Problem," 91.
159. Freimark, "Language Behavior and Assimilation," 162-63.
160. George Mosse, "Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and

320
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

Respectability," in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the

Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Juduha Reinharz (Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1985),6-7.
161. Hannah Franziska Augstein, "Linguistics and Politics in the Early Nine-
teenth Century: James Cowles Prichard's Moral Philology," History of
European Ideas 23, no. I (1997): 5.
162. Cited in Beyer, Deutsche Einflusse, 184-85n.
163. Julius Fiirst, Leht;gebiiude der aramiiischen Idiome mit Bezug auf die
Indo-Germanischen Sprachen (Leipzig: Karl Tauchmitz, 1835), ix-x.
164. Heinrich Ewald, "Abhandlung iiber den Zusammenhang des Nordis-
chen (Tiirkischen), Mittellandischen, Semitischen und Koptischen
Sprachstammes," in Abhandlungen der ko·niglichen Geseilschaft der
Wissmschaftm in Gottingen (Berlin, 1862), 10:4, 71, 74.
165. See the biographical sketch in Theodor Benfey, Kleinere Schriften, ed.
Adalbert Bezzenberger (Berlin: H. Reuther's Verlagsbuchhandlung,
1890), 1 :xiii.
166. Benfey, Kleinere Schriften, 1 :xv.
167. See Theodor Benfey, Die persischen Keilinschriften mit Uebersetzung und
Glossar(Leipzig: Brockhaus & Avenarius, 1847), and his review of Her-
mann Brockhaus's Vendidad and Friedrich Spiegel's Avesta in the Got-
tingische Gelehrte Anzeigen (1850): 1193-1236, (1852): 1953-76, and
(1853): 57-93.
168. Henry Hoenigswald, "Historiography as Source: The Mterlife of
Theodor Bcnfey," in Lingua et traditio: Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft
und der neueren Philologien, ed. Hans Helmut Christmann and Richard
Baum (Tiibingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994),424.
169. Theodor Benfey and Moriz A. Stern, Ueber die Monatsnamm einiger
alter VOlker insbesondere der Perser, Cappodocier, Juden und Syrer (Berlin:
G. Reimer, 1836), 121.
170. Theodor Benfey, Pantschatantra: Funf Bucher indischer Fabeln, Miirchen
und Erziihlungen aus dem Sanskrit ubersetzt (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1859),
l:xxiii.
171. Christian Charles Josias Bunsen, Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal
History Applied to Language and Religion (London: Longman, Brown,
Green, and Longmans, 1854), 1:172ff.
172. Theodor Bentey, Ueber das Verhiiltniss der iigyptischen Sprache zum semi-
tischen Sprachstamm. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1844), vi-vii.
173. See the discllssion in Delbriick, Introduction to the Study of Language,
78.
174. On Bentey's repudiation of the term root see Theodor Benfey, "Pott:
Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Indo-Germanischen
Sprachen" (1837), in Kleinere Schriften, 4:30ff

321
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

175. On this theory see Theodor Bentey, "Ein abschnitt aus meiner vorlesung
uber 'vergleichende Grammatik der indo-germanischen sprachen,'"
Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete des
deutschen,grieschischen, und lateinischen 9 (1860): 81-132.
176. See the discussion in Delbruck, Introduction to the Study of Language,
86.
177. Theodor Benfey, "Muller: Lectures on the Science of Language" (1862),
in Kleinere Schriften, 4:129.
178. Benfey, "Muller," 4:128-29.
179. Beyer, Deutsche Einflusse, 184.
180. Pott, "Indogermanischer Sprachstamm," 14.
181. August Wilhelm Schlegel, "De I'origine des hindous," in Essais litteraires
et historiques (Bonn: E. Weber, 1842),489.
182. Pott, "Indogermanischer Sprachstamm," 12.
183. Koerner, "Friedrich Schlegel," 281.
184. See Koerner, "Friedrich Schlegel," 282.
185. Augstein, "Linguistics and Politics," 4-5.
186. Humboldt, Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, 368.
187. Humboldt, Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues,
371-73. See also Augstein, "Linguistics and Politics," 7.
188. Humboldt, Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, 368.
189. Grossmann, "Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Ideology," 25.
190. Grossmann, "Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Ideology," 37-38.
191. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern
Judaism (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994),59.
192. Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980) 76-83.
193. Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry, 22.
194. Olender, Languages of Paradise, 9ff,
195. Olender, Languages of Paradise, 139ft:
196. Sheldon Pollack has argued that German Orientalism was from its incep-
tion directed inward toward Europe and the internal colonization of
Jews in the National Socialist period. See his "Deep Orientalism?" See
also Ritchie Robertson, '" Urheimat Asien': The Re-Orientation of Ger-
man and Austrian Jews, 1900-1925," German Life and Letters 49, no. 2
(1996): 182-92; and Nadia Malinovich, "Orientalism and the Construc-
tion ofJewish Identity in France, 1900-1932," Jewish Culture and His-
tory 2, no. 1 (1999): 1-25.
197. Johann Heinrich Kalthoff, Handbuch der hebriiischen Alterti,imer (Mun-
ster: Theissingsche Buchhandlung, 1840), 3, 5, 6.
198. Kalthoff, Handbuch,409-10.

322
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

Chapter 3

1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin: Realschul-

buchhandlung, 1808), 114-17, 139-44.
2. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 48.
3. Cited in Klaus von See, Deutsche Germanen-Ideologie vom Humanismus
bis zur Gegenwart (frankfurt: Athenaum, 1970), 68ff.
4. See Uwe Meves, "Zur Namesgebung 'Germanist,'" in Wissenschafts-
geschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jiirgen Fohrmann and
Wilhelm VoBkamp (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994),25-47.
5. See Susan A. Crane, Collecting and the Historical Consciousness in Early
Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
6. Peter Hans Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 208.
7. Williamson, Longing for Myth, 84ff.
8. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, "Ueber die Grundsatze der nellen
Bearbeitung vom Liede der Nibelungen," Eunomia: Eine Zeitschrift des
19. Jahrhunderts 1 (1805): 254.
9. Joachim Burkhard Richter, Hans Ferdinand Mafimann: Altdeutscher
Patriotism us im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1992), 43ff.
10. Cited in Eckhard Grunewald, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen: Ein
Beitrag zur Fruhgeschichte der Germanistik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988),2.
11. Grunewald, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, 338.
12. Grunewald, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, 41-42.
13. Hagen, "Grundsatze der neueren Bearbeitung," 255-56.
14. "Old, vigorous works" were reduced, in their hands, to "linguistic
curiosities and rarities" slated to be "buried ... in libraries" (Hagen,
"Grundsatze der neueren Bearbeitung," 256).
15. Werner Bahner and Werner Neumann, eds., Sprachwissenschaftliche Ger-
manistik: Ihre Herausbildung und Begrundung (Berlin: Akademie-Ver-
lag, 1985), 160-65.
16. Jacob Grimm, "Uber Etymologie und Sprachvergleichung" (1854), in
Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Ferdinand Diimmler, 1879), 1:309.
17. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, ed. Wilhelm Scherer (Gottingen:
Dieterichsche Buchhandlung, 1819), l:xviii.
18. Toews, Becoming Historical, 322.
19. See Sigmar Hellerich, Religionizing, Romanizing Romantics: The
Catholico-Christian Camouflage of the Early German Romantics: Wack-
enroder, Tieck, Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel (New
York: Peter Lang, 1995), xix ff.
20. Williamson, Longing for Myth, 72ff.

323
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

21. Williamson, Longingfor Myth, 73.

22. Murray B. Peppard, Paths through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers
Grimm (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971),49-50,67.
23. Toews, Becoming Historical, 340.
24. Toews, Becoming Historical, 342.
25. "Wissenschaftshistorische Stufen sprachgeschichtlicher Forschung I:
Geschichte der Sprachgeschichtsforschung entlang der Zeitlinie," in
Sprachgeschichte: Bin Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und
ihrer Brforschung, cd. Werner Besch, Oskar Reichmann, and Stefan Son-
deregger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 1:309-15.
26. Gunhild Ginschel, Der Junge Jacob Grimm, 1805-1819 (Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1967), 331.
27. Cited in Konrad Koerner, "Jacob Grimm's Place in the Foundation of
Linguistics as a Science," in Practicing Linguistic Historiography, Studies
in the History of the Language Sciences 50 (Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins, 1989), 305-6.
28. Bahner and Neumann, Sprachwissenschaftliche Germanistik, 130.
29. Ginschel, Der Junge Jacob Grimm, 362.
30. Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 33-34.
31. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1 :xxiv, xiv.
32. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:xxiv.
33. Twentieth-century linguists divide the Germanic languages into north-
ern, western, and eastern subgroups. The North Germanic languages
include Icelandic, Faroese, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian; English,
German, Dutch, and Frisian compose the West Germanic languages. The
members of the eastern group, Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic are all
extinct and little is known of them except for Gothic, for which a fourth-
century Bible translation is extant.
34. Hans Frede Nidsen, "Jacob Grimm and the 'German' Dialects," in The
Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, ed. Elmer H. Antonsen
(Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990),25-26.
35. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:546.
36. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1 :xxi-xxii.
37. These are the examples Grimm presented in the Geschichte der deutschen
Sprache (Leipzig: Weidmannische Buchhandlung, 1848), 1:842.
38. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1 :547.
39. The term Umlaut refers to changes in the vowel that can express a vari-
ety of grammatical functions such as noun plurals ("Bruder" [brother]
becomes "Bruder"), the subjunctive case ("wir waren" [we were]
becomes "wir waren" [we would be]), and adjective comparison, as in
the word for "big" ("grop' becomes "grOfler"). See Grimm, Deutsche
Grammatik, 2:73.

324
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

40. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1 :546.

41. The earliest Germanic tongues revealed only "pure changes to the root
vowel"; later versions could be identified by the extent to which they
"give up their roots and relinquish their vowel changes," compensating
for this loss through "compound constructions." The newer Germanic
languages were, according to Grimm, distinguished by "the appending
of an auxiliary root." See Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2:74.
42. Grimm was inspired to recast the first volume of the work after review-
ing Rask's Undersiigelse om det gamle Nordiske elier Islandske Sprogs
Oprindelse (1818), which argued that sounds are a central body of lin-
guistic evidence. Rask, not Grimm, was the first to note that cognate lan-
guages display systematic sound-correspondences that can be stated as
rules. The nineteenth-century linguist Holger Pedersen suggested for
this reason that the Germanic sound shifts identified by Grimm should
actually be known as "Rask's Law," although most historians now agree
that this overstates the credit due to Rask. It was the 1822 edition of
Grimm's grammar that established the importance of phonology in his-
torical linguistics, an area of study ignored by Bopp and only applied to
the Indo-European languages by August Friedrich Pott in 1833. See
Koerner, Practicing Linguistic Historiography, 304.
43. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edition (Gottingen: Dieterich-
sche Buchhandlung, 1822), 1:584.
44. Proto-Germanic is the language believed to have been spoken around the
North Sea and the Baltic before 1000 BC. One third of its vocabulary
lacks Indo-European cognates, most notably words having to do with
the ocean such as, in English, sea, ship, and boat. See Asher and Simp-
son, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3:1426.
45. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd ed., 1:584-85.
46. R. L. Trask, Historical Linguistics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996),
224-26.
47. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd ed., 1 :590, 588.
48. Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 38.
49. Toews, Becoming Historical, 347.
50. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:xxvi.
51. Toews, Becoming Historical, 345.
52. Toews, Becoming Historical, 342.
53. Asher and Simpson, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics,
3:1419-20.
54. Jacob Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, 3:320. See also Klaus von See, Barbar,
Germane, Arier: Die Suche nach der Identittit der Deutschen (Heidelberg:
Carl Winter, 1994), 138.
55. James J. Sheehan, "What Is German History?" 1-23.

325
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

56. Besch, "Dialekt, Schreibdialekt, Schriftsprache, Standardsprache," 978.

57. Toews, Becoming Historical, 344.
58. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd ed., l:xiii.
59. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd ed., l:xiii.
60. Chauncy Jeffries Mellor, Scholarly Purpose and National Purpose in Jacob
Grimm's Work on the (Deutsches Worterbuch' (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1972),361.
61. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:10.
62. Walter Haas, Jacob Grimm und die deutschen Mundarten (Stuttgart:
Steiner, 1990), 6ff.
63. Johann Andreas Schmeller, Uber Schrift und Schriftunterricht: Ein ABC-
Buchlein in die Hande Lehrender, ed. Hermann Barkey (Munich: Bay-
erische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1965), 41.
64. Schmellcr, Uber Schrift und Schriftunterricht, 41.
65. Schmeller, Uber Schrift und Schriftunterricht, 11.
66. Schmeller, Uber Schrift und Schl'iftunterricht, 42. He later devised the
first historically based phonetic transcription adequate to the phonology
of the German dialects.
67. Peter Wiesinger, "Johann Andreas Schmeller ais Sprachsoziologe," in
Linguistic Method: Essays in Honor of Herbert Pernzl, ed. Irmengard
Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (New York: Mouton, 1979),591.
68. Johann Andreas SchmelIer, Die Mundarten Bayerns grammatisch
dargesteltt von Johann Andreas Schmelter (Munich: Karl Thienemann,
1821), x.
69. Franz Josef Stalder, Probe eines schweizerischen Idiotikons; hie und da mit
etymologischen Bemerkungen untermischt (1805).
70. Johann Andreas Schmeller, "Sprache der Baiern," in Ludwig Rockinger,
An der Wiege der bayerischen Mzmdart-Grammatik und des bayerischen
Worterbuchs (Aalen: Scienta, 1985), 70.
71. Celia Appelgate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 13.
72. Johann Andreas Schmeller, "Lauter gemahte Wiesen fur die Reaktion":
Die erste Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts in den Tagebuchern Johann Andreas
Schmellers, ed. Reinhard Bauer and Ursula Miinchhoff (Munich: Serie
Piper, 1990),67.
73. SchmeIIer, Die Mundarten Bayerns, ix.
74. SchmeIIer, Die Mundarten Bayerns, x.
75. Schmeller, Die Mundarten BaYe1'ns, 2If.
76. SchmelIer, Die Mundarten Bayerns, 30.
77. Bernd Naumann, "Heymann Steinthais Position in der Geschichte der
Sprachwissenschaft," in Germanistik und Deutschunterricht im Zeitalter
der Technologie, ed. N. OcHers (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 1 :90; and

326
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

Richard J. Brunner, Johann Andreas Schmelter: Sprachwissenschaftler und

Philologe (Innsbruck: Institut fur vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft,
1971),66.
78. Ludwig M. Eichinger and Bernd Naumann, eds., Johann Andreas
Schmelter und der Beginn der Germanistik (Munich: R. Olden bourg,
1988),41.
79. Schmeller, Die Mundarten Bayerns, 30.
80. Schmeller, Die Mundarten Rayerm, 163.
81. Johann Christoph Adelung, Uber die Geschichte der deutschen Sprache,
uber Deutsche Mundarten und Deutsche Sprachlehre (Leipzig: Johnann
Gottlieb Immanuel Breitkopf, 1781),37.
82. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, l:x.
83. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, l:xxxiii.
84. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1 :xxxiii.
85. Cited in Ronald Feldmann, Jacob Grimm und die Politik (Kassel: Baren-
reiter, 1971), 110.
86. See Feldmann, Jacob Grimm, 111-12.
87. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd ed. l:xiii.
88. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1 :828.
89. See Feldmann, Jacob Grimm, 54ff.
90. Schmeller, Die Mundarten Bayerns, vi-vii.
91. Schmeller, "Lauter gemiihte Wiesen fur die Reaktion," 195.
92. Uwe Meves, "Zum InstitutionalisierungsprozeB der deutschen Philolo-
gie: Die Periode der Lehrstuhlerrichtung," in Wissemchaftsgeschichte der
Germanistik, 186.
93. Jorg Jochen Muller, "Germanistik-Eine Form biirgerlicher Opposi-
tion," in Germanistik und deutsche Nation, 1806-1848: Zur Konstitution
bur;gerlichen Bewufitseins, cd. Jorg Jochen Muller (Stuttgart: J. B. Met-
zler, 2000), 39ff.
94. The recollections of students who took German in the Vormiirz are
remarkably devoid of nationalist pathos. See Rudiger Gans, "Erfahrun-
gen mit dem Deutschunterricht: Eine Analyse aurobiographischer Zeug-
nisse im Zusammenhang mit der Geschichte des Bildungsburgertums im
19. Jahrhundert," in Muttersprachlicher Unterricht im neunzehnten
Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zu seiner Genese und Institutionalisierung,
ed. Hans-Dieter Edinger and Clemens Knoblauch (Tubingen:
Niemeyer, 1991), 29.
95. Reinhart Koselleck, "Einleitung-Zur anthropologischen und semantis-
chen Strukture der Bildung," in Bildungsbur;gertum im 19. Jahrhundert,
cd. Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985), 2: 11-46.
96. Wolfgang Kaschuba, "Deutsche Biirgerlichkeit nach 1800. Kultur als
symbolische Praxis," in Bur;gertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jiirgen Kocka

327
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995),2:92-127.

97. Jiirgen Kocka, "Das europaische Muster und der deutsche Fall," in Bii1;g-
ertum im 19. Jahrhundert, 1: 19.
98. Karen Hagemann, "Of , Manly Valor' and 'German Honor': Nation, War,
and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising against Napoleon,"
Central European History 30, no. 2 (1997): 206-7.
99. Hagemann, "Of 'Manly Valor' and 'German Honor,'" 203-8.
100. Brigit Benes, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jacob Grimm, August Schleicher:
Ein Vergleich ihrer Sprachauffassungen (Winterthur: P. G. Keller, 1958),
65.
101. See Toews, Becoming Historical, 348. This bias partially explains
Grimm's exclusive focus on the importance of consonants in the Ger-
manic sound shifts.
102. Jacob Grimm, "Uber den Ursprung der Sprache," in Kleinere Schriften,
1:281.
103. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 3:343.
104. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 3:343.
105. See Jacob Grimm, "Uber Frauennamen aus Blumen" (1852), in Kleinere
Schriften, 2:366-401.
106. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:46.
107. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:46.
108. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:35.
109. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:28.
1l0. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:xi.
Ill. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1:30.
112. John M. Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and their
Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 32.
113. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wiirterbuch von Jacob und
Wilhelm Grimm (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), 1:xiii.
114. Wolfgang Mommsen, RU:I;gerliche Kultur und politische Ordnung,
1831-1933: Kunstler, Schriftsteller und Intellektuelle in der deutschen
Geschichte, 1831-1933 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000),
59.
115. Claudia Bartels, "Deutschunterricht ohne Deutschlehrer," in Satzlehre-
Denkschulung- N ationalsprache: Deutsche Schulgrammatik zwischen 1800
und 1850, ed. Hans Dietrich Erlinger and Clemens Knobloch (Munster:
Nodus Publikationen, 1989), 21. See also Raumer, Geschichte der gcr-
manischen Philologie, 685.
116. Gans, "Erfahrungen mit dem Deutschunterricht," 22.
117. Hans Dieter Edinger and Clemens Knobloch, "Einleitung," in Edinger
and Knobloch, Muttersprachlicher Unterricht im neunzehnten Jahrhun-
dert, 1-2.

328
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

ll8. Gans, "Erfahrungen mit dem Deutschunterricht," 13.

119. Dieter Langewiesche, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutsch-
land und Europa (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000),181-89.
120. Christopher Clark, "Germany: 1815-1848: Restoration or Pre-March,"
111 Nineteenth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture and Society
1780-1918, ed. John Breuilly (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000),61.
121. Werner Besch, "Die Entstehung und Ausbreitung der neuhochdeutschen
Schriftsprache/Standardsprache," in Besch, Reichmann, and Sondereg-
ger, Sprachgeschichte, 2:1783ff.
122. Schmeller, "Sprache der Baiern," 73.
123. In Rockinger, An der Wiege, 198-99.
124. Schmcllcr, Die Mundarten Bayerns, 4.
125. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Johann Andreas Schmelter, 1785-1852:
Gediichtnisaussteltung zum 200. Geburtsjahr (Munich: R. Oldenbourg,
1985), 155ff.
126. Johann Andreas Schmeller, "Uber die sogenannten Cimbern der VII und
Vill Communen auf den Venedischen Alpen und ihre Sprache," in
Abhandlungen der philosophisch-philologischen Classe der koniglichen bay-
erischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich: Mich. Lindauerschen
Hofbuchdruckerey, 1838),2:3; and Schmeller, Sogenanntes Cimbrisches
Worterbuch, das ist Deutsches Idiotikon der VII und VIII Communi in
den Venetianischen Alpen, ed. Joseph Bergmann (Vienna: Kaiser!.-
Konig!. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei, 1855).
127. Schmeller, Die Mundarten Bayerns, vi.
128. Johann Andreas Schmeller, Bayerisches Worterbuch. Sammlung von
Wortern und Ausdrucken ... mit unkundlichen Relegen (Stuttgart: J. G.
Cotta, 1827-37), l:ix.
129. Richter, Hans Ferdinand Maflmann, 268.
130. Schmeller, Bayerisches Worterbuch, 1:dedication.
131. Schmeller, Bayerisches Wijrterbuch, 1 :vii.
132. Asher and Simp~on, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 7:3681.
133. Schmeller, Bayerisches Worterbuch, 1 :vii.
134. Schmeller, Bayerisches Worterbuch, l:xv.
135. Schmeller, Bayerisches Worterbuch, 1:ix.
136. See Eberhard Diinninger, "Heimat und Geschichte bei Johann Andreas
Schmeller," in Eichinger and Naumann, Johann Andreas Schmelter und
der Beginn der Germanisitik, 205.
137. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd ed., l:xi.
138. See Eric W. Gritsch, "Luther and the State: Post-Reformation Ramifica-
tions," in Luther and the Modern State in Germany: Sixteenth-Century
Essays and Studies, ed. James D. Tracy, 45-60 (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth

329
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

Century Journal Publishers, 1986).

139. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie (Gottingen: Dieterichsche Buchhand-
lung, 1835; reprint, Granz: Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt,
1953), 1:3.
140. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 1:4.
141. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 1:5.
142. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, l:xxxvii-xxxviii.
143. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, l:v.
144. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsalterthumer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1955), 1 :xviii.
145. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, ]: 10.
146. Carola L. Gottzmann, "Die altnordischen Studien und Publikationen
von Wilhelm und Jacob Grimm zur Literatur, Sprache, Ur-und
Friihgeschichte, Rechtsgeschichte, Geschichte und Runologie" Bruder
Grimm Gedenken 7 (1987), 64.
147. Wilhelm Grimm, "Die altnordische Literatur in der gegenwartigen Peri-
ode" (1820), in Kleinere Schriften, ed. Gustav Hinriches (Berlin: Ferdi-
nand Diimmler, 1882-87),2:83-84.
148. See Wilhelm Grimm, Uber deutsche Runen (Gottingen: Dieterichsche
Buchhandlung, 1821).
149. Toews, Becoming Historical, 318.
] 50. Toews, Becoming Historical, 363.
151. R. Hinton Thomas, Liberalism, Nationalism, and the German Intellectu-
als (1822-1847): An Analysis of the Academic and Scientific Conferences
of the Period (Cambridge: W. Heffler & Sons, 1951), 8lff.
152. Jacob Grimm, "Ober die wechselseitigen beziehungen und die
verbindung der drei in der versammlung vertretenen wissenschaften," in
Klein ere Schriften, 7:557.
153. Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches WiJrterbuch, 1:1xviii.
154. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1 :iv.
155. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1 :v.
156. Bentey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 457.
157. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 2:800.
158. Raumer, Geschichte der germanischen Philologie, 640.
159. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1 :xiii.
160. Koerner, "Jacob Grimm's Place," 312-13.
161. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1:5.
162. Jacob Grimm, Gcschichtc dcr dcutschcn Sprachc, 1 :7.
163. Raumer, Geschichte der germanischen Philologie, 640.
164. Toews, Becoming Historical, 367-68.
165. Toews, Becoming Historical, 368.
166. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1 :482.

330
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

167. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1 :438.

168. Jacob Grimm, GeJchichte der deutJchen Sprache, 2:1035.
169. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 2:837.
170. Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1 :vi.
171. Cited in Heinz Gollwitzer, "Zum politisehen Germanismus des neun-
zehnten Jahrhunderts," in Festschrift fur Hermann Heimpel zum 70.
Geburtstag, ed. Hermann Heimpel and Theodor Sehieder, vo!' 1 (Got-
tingen: Vandenhoeek & Ruprecht, 1971),289.
172. Cited in Roland Pozorny, Hoffmann von Fallersleben: Ein Lebens-und
Zeitbild (Berg: Turmer, 1982), 121.
173. Langewiesehe, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat, 181-89.
174. Brian Viek, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians
and National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2002), 110,203.
175. Schmeller, "Lauter gemiihte Wiesen fur die Reaktion," 271.
176. See also Eberhard Diinninger, "Heimat und Gesehiehte," 207.
177. Feldmann, Jacob Grimm und die Politik, 250.
178. Jacob Grimm, "Ober den Ursprung der Spraehe," 1:277.
179. Jacob Grimm, On the Origin ofLanguage, trans. Raymond A. Wiley (Lei-
den: Brill, 1984), 6.
180. Jacob Grimm, On the Origin of Language, 7.
181. Jacob Grimm, On the Origin of Language, 8.
182. Toews, Becoming Historical, 371.
183. Raumcr, Geschichte der germanischen Philologie, 611, 687-88.
184. Cited in Meves, "Zum InstitutionalisierungsprozeB der deutsehen
Philologie," 180-8l.
185. Cited in Meves, "Zum InstitutionalisierungsprozeB der deutsehen
Philologie," 182.
186. Meves, "Zum InstitutionalisierungsprozeB der deutsehen Philologie,"
186ff.
187. Meves, "Zum InstitutionalisierungsprozeB der deutsehen Philologie,"
45.
188. Cited in Woltgang Hoppner, Das «Ererbte, Erlebte und Erlernte" im Werk
Wilhelm Scherers: Ein Beitrag zur GeJchichte der Germanistik (Cologne:
Bohlau, 1993),211.
189. Jiirgen Sternsdorff, WissenschaftJkonstitution und Reichsgrundung: Die
Entwicklung der Germanistik bei Wilhelm Scherer: Eine Biographie nach
unveriJffentlichen Quellen (Frankttlft: Peter Lang, 1979), 70-73.
190. Sternsdorff, Wissenschaftskonstitution und Reichsgrundung, 147ff.
191. See Wilhelm Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Berlin: Thomas
Knaur, 1883).
192. Cited in Hoppner, «Ererbte, Erlebte und Erlernte" 213.

331
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

193. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, ix.

194. Kurt R. ]ankowsky, introduction to ]ankowsky, cd., Wilhelm Scherer: Zur
Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995),
XVII.
195. Scherer, Geschichtc dcr deutschen Sprache, x.
196. Jankowsky, xvi.
197. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, x-xi.
198. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, vii.
199. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 2l.
200. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 85-88.
201. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 165.
202. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 156-58.
203. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 162-63.
204. See Franz GreB, Germanistik und Politik: Kritische Beitrage zur
Geschichte einer nationalen Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Frommann -Holz-
boog, 1971), 35-36.
205. See, for example, Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 154.
206. Jankowsky, xxiv.
207. Sternsdorff, Wissenschaftskonstitution und Reichsgrundung, 175.
208. Jost Hermand, Geschichte der Germanistik (Reinbeck bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt Taschenbuchveriag, 1994),54-55.
209. Sengupta, From Salon to Discipline, 89, 101.
210. Meves, "Zum InstitutionalisierungsprozeB der deutschen Philologie,"
196.
211. Wolf von Schierbrand, cd., The Kaiser's Speeches Forming a Character
Portrait of Emperor Wilhelm II (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1902),
214.

Chapter 4

1. Friedrich August Wolf~ "Darstellung der Alterthums-Wissenschaft," in

Kleine Schriften in lateinischer und deutscher Sprache (Halle: Verlag der
Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1807),2:817-21.
2. Friedrich Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, ix-x.
3. Schlegel, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 218-19.
4. August Friedrich Pott, Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der
Indo-Germanischen Sprachen, mit besonderem Bezug auf die Lau-
tumwandlung im Sanskrit, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Littauischen und
Gothischen (Lemgo: Meyersche Hof-Buchhandlung, 1833), l:xiv.
5. La Vopa, "Specialists against Specialization," 3lf.
6. Grafton, "Polyhistor into Philolog," 162-71, 182-83; Marchand, Down
from Olympus, 24-35.

332
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

7. La Vopa, "Specialists against Specialization," 34.

8. La Vopa, "Specialists against Specialization," 40.
9. Friedrich August Wolt~ "Darstellung der A1terthumswissenschaft," in F.
A. Wo(rs Vorlesung iiber die Encyclopiidie der AlterthumSlvissenschaJt, ed.
J. D. Gurtler (Leipzig: August Lehnhold, 1831),63,47.
10. Wolf, "Darstellung der A1terthumswissenschaft," 48.
11. Wolf, "Darstellung der A1terthumswissenschaft," 49.
12. Friedrich August Wolf, "Einleitung in die A1terthumswissenschaft," in F.
A. Wolf's Vorlesung iiber die Encyclopiidie der Alterthumswissenschaft,
43-44.
13. Wolf, "Darstellung der A1terthumswissenschaft," 52.
14. Wolf, "Einleitung in die Alterthumswissenschaft," 24.
15. See Friedrich August Wolf, Allgemeine Grammatik als Grundlage des
Unterrichts in jeder besonderen Sprache (Gorlitz: C. G. Anton, 1810), 12.
16. Wolf, "Darstellung der A1terthumswissenschaft," 1:75.
17. Wolf, Allgemeine Grammatik, 13ff.
18. Wolf, "Darstellung der A1terthumswissenschaft," 1:56.
19. Ernest Vogt, "Der Methodenstreit zwischen Hermann und Bockh," in
Philologie und Hermeneutik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert: 7-ur Geschichte
und Methodologie der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. Mayotte Bollack and
Heinz Wismann (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1983), 1:107.
20. See Otto Jahn, Gottfried Hermann: Eine Gediichtnissrede (Leipzig: Wei-
dmannsche Buchhandlung, 1849), 12ff.
21. John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (New York:
Hafner, 1958), 3:92.
22. Marchand, Downfrom Olympus, 7-16.
23. Manfred Fuhrmann, Brechungen: Wirkungsgeschichtliche Studien zur
antik-europiiischen Bildungstradition (Stuttgart: K1ett-Cota, 1982),
135-36.
24. See in particular Walter Ruegg, "Die Antike als Begrundung des
deutschen NationalbewuBtseins," in Antike in der Moderne, ed. Wolf-
gang Schuller, 261-87 (Constance: Universitatsverlag Konstanz, 1985);
and Manfred Fuhrmann, "Die Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,
der Nationalismus und die deutsche K1assik," in Brechungen: Wirkungs-
geschichtliche Studien zur antik-europiiischen Bildungstradition, 129-49
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982).
25. See August Boeckh's reflections on the founding of the university in
Berlin: "Ueber den Sinn und Geist der Grundung der Berliner Univer-
sitat," in Gesammelte kleine Schriften (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1858),
2:131-47.
26. See Marchand, DOJVn from Olympus, 24-28.
27. La Vopa, "Specialists against Specialization," 34.

333
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

28. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Latium und Hellas oder Betrachtungen uber
das classische Alterthum," in Wilhelm von Humboldts Werke, 3:137-38.
29. Klemens Menze, Wilhelm von Humboldt und Christian Gottlob Heyne
(Ratingen bei Dusseldorf: Henn, 1966), 36.
30. Marchand, DOJVn from Olympus, 28.
31. Humboldt, "Latium und Hellas," 3:166.
32. Humboldt, "Latium und Hellas," 3: 163.
33. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Geschichte des Verfalls und Untergangs der
griechischen Freistaaten," in Werke in funf Biinden, ed. Andreas Flitner
and Klaus Giel (Berlin: Rutten & Loening, 1961),2:87-89.
34. Friedrich Ast, "Uber den Geist des Altertums und dessen Bedeutung fur
unser Zeitalter," in Kleine Piidagogische Texte, vol. 17, Dokumente des
Neuhumanismus(Berlin: Julius Beltz, 1931), 1:16.
35. See Johann Arnold Kanne, Ueber die VerJVandtschaft der griechischen und
teutschen Sprache (Leipzig: Wilhelm Rein, 1804).
36. Cited in Hans Loewe, Friedrich Thiersch, Ein Humanisten Leben
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1913), 132.
37. Each of the modern European languages embodied one quality of Greek.
Portuguese, for example, resembled the Ionian dialect; Spanish was akin
to Doric and Aeolian in that it was "magnificent, solemn, and proud."
See Ast, "Ober den Geist des Altertums," 1:28-29.
38. Ast, "Uber den Geist des Altertums," 1 :28.
39. Ast, "Uber den Geist des Altertums," 1:21.
40. Ast, "Uber den Geist des Alrerrums," 1:15-16.
41. Franz Passow, "Die griechische Sprache, nach ihrer Bedeutung in der
Bildung deutscher Jugend," in Archiv deutscher Nationalbildung, ed.
Reinhold Bernhard Jackmann and Franz Passow (Berlin: Friedrich Mau-
rer, 1812), 1:126.
42. Franz Passow, "Der griechischen Sprache padagogischer Vorrang vor der
lateinischen, von der Schattenseite betrachtet," in Vermischte Schriften,
ed. W. A. Passow (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1843),23.
43. Passow, "Der griechischen Sprache," 115.
44. Passow, "Der griechischen Sprache," 107-8.
45. Humboldt, "Latium und Hellas," 3:169.
46. Humboldt, "Latium und Hellas," 3:167.
47. See, for example, Kruger's attack on Georg Curtius and the comparative
method in the epilogue of his Griechische Sprachlehre fur Schulen
(Leipzig: R. W. KrUger, 1875),202-14.
48. Gottfried Hermann, Acta Societatis Graecae (Leipzig: C. H. Funkhanel,
1836-40), xii-xiii.
49. Bahner and Neumann, SprachJVissenschaftliche Germanistik, 342.
50. Conrad Bursian, Geschichte der classischen Philologie in Deutschland von

334
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

den Anfiingen his zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: R. Olden bourg, 1883),

2:972.
51. Wilhelm Kroll, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1919), 124.
52. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, 3:205ff.
53. Benfey, Geschichte der SprachwissenschaJt, 640. See his account of the
application of comparative-historical techniques to the classical lan-
guages, 972ff.
54. The dialect of Athens and its surroundings, Attic became the received
standard form of Greek due partially to the literary prestige of the city.
The northern kingdom of Macedon adopted the literary form of Attic as
the language of the royal court toward the end of the fifth century BC,
su it was the form of Greek that was spread over the whole of the east-
ern Mediterranean and beyond by the Macedonian conquests. The three
principal earlier Greek dialects were Doric, Aeolic, and Ionic. See Asher
and Simpson, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3: 1494.
55. Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 642.
56. Bahner and Neumann, Sprachwissenschaftliche Germanistik, 342.
57. Helmut F1ashar, "Die methodisch-hermeneutischen Ansatze von
Friedrich August Wolf und Friedrich Ast," in Philologie und Hermeneu-
tik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 1: 30-31.
58. Marchand, Down from Olympus, xx.
59. Karl Christ, "Aspekte der Antike- Rezeption in der deutschen A1tertums-
wissenschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Die Antike im 19. Jahrhundert in
Italien und Deutschland, ed. Karl Christ and Arnaldo Momigliano
(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988),26.
60. August Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie der philologischen Wis-
senschaften, ed. Ernst Bratuscheck (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1886),21.
61. Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 300.
62. Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 28.
63. Axel Horstmann, "August Boeckh und die Antike-Rezeption 1m 19.
Jahrhundert," in Die Antike im 19. Jahrhundert, 72.
64. Grafton, "Polyhistor into Philolog," 181.
65. These lectures were compiled and published in 1886 after Boeckh's
death largely from his personal notes and those of his students by Ernst
Bratuscheck. See Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 56.
66. See Horstmann, "August Boeckh," 45.
67. Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 10.
68. Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 10-11.
69. According to Axel Horstmann, this broad definition of philology, which
could include the study of medieval German texts and newer European
literature presented classicists with an unrecognized problem oflegitima-

335
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

tion. See Horstmann, "August Boeckh," 69.

70. Ulrich Muhlack, "Zum Verhaltnis von Klassischer Philologie und
Geschichtswissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert," in Philologie und
Hermeneutik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 1:230.
71. Boeckh, Encyklopadie und Methodologie, 17.
72. Boeckh, Encyklopadie und Methodologie, 57.
73. Horstmann, "August Boeckh," 55-60.
74. See Horstmann, "August Boeckh," 45.
75. Gottfried Hermann, Ueber Herrn Professor Bockhs Behandlung der
griechischen Inschriften (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1826), 3.
76. Hermann, Ueber Herrn Professor Bockhs Behandlung, 4.
77. Hermann, Ueber Herrn Professor Bockhs Behandlung, 9.
78. Cited in Vogr, "Der Methodenstreit zwischen Hermann und B6ckh,"
116.
79. Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 6. See also Brigitte Hauger's
remarks in Johan Nicolai Madvig: The Language Theory of a Classical
Philologist (Munster: Nodus, 1994),46.
80. Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 12.
81. Boeckh, Encyklopadie und Methodologie, 763.
82. Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 276.
83. Boeckh, Encyklopiidie und Methodologie, 763.
84. Hauger, Johan Nicolai Madvig, 195.
85. Williamson, Longing for Myth in Germany, 237.
86. Williamson, Longingfor Myth in Germany, 121-50.
87. Williamson, Longingfor Myth in Germany, 149.
88. See Heinrich Thiersch, Friedrich Thiersch's Leben, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Win-
ter'sche Verlagshandlung, 1866).
89. Heinrich Thiersch, Friedrich Thiersch's Leben, 1:72ff.
90. Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst unter den
Griechen, 2nd edition (Munich: Literarisch-artistische Anstalt, 1829),
110.
91. Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst, 6.
92. Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Rpochen der bildenden Kunst, 110.
93. Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst, 6.
94. Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst, 18-19.
95. Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst, 110-11.
96. Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst, 24-25.
97. See Traian Stoianovieh, Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe
(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
98. Flemming, "Orientalism, the Balkans," 1221.
99. Andrea Fuchs-Sumiyoshi. Orientalismus in der deutschen Literatur (New
York: Georg Olms, 1984), 12.

336
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

100. Johannes Irmscher, Der Philhellenismus in Preuflen als Forschungsan-

liegen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1966),2:11.
10 1. For a detailed, early twentieth-century examination of Thiersch's news-
paper articles on the state of Greece during the revolution and the course
of the German regency and Otto's reign, see Hans Loewe, Friedrich
Thiersch und diegriechische Frage (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1913).
102. Christopher Hauser, Anfiinge burgerlicher Organisation: Philhellenismus
und Fruhliberalismus in Sudwestdeutschland (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1990).
103. See Hans Eideneier, "Hellenen und Philhellenen," in Griechen und
Deutsche: Bilder vom Andern, ed. Kirsten Fast and Jan Peter Thorbecke,
63-75 (Darmstadt: H. Austhes, 1982).
104. Wolf Seidl, Bayern in Griechenland: Die Geburt desgriechischen National-
staates und die Regierung IOinig Ottos (Munich: Prestel, 1981), 106ff.
105. Seidel, Bayern in Griechenland, 149ff.
a
106. Friedrich Thiersch, VEtat actuel de la Greee et des moyens d)arriver sa
restauration (F. A. Brockhaus, 1833), 1:194.
107. While on the Peloponnesus, Thiersch discovered in the archaic dialect of
the Zakonians in Rrastos what he considered to be irrefutable linguistic
evidence for the continuity thesis. Other travelers to Greece and Turkey,
including the Bavarian historian and Orientalist Jakob Philipp Fallmer-
ayer (1790-1861) returned as antiphilhellenes. See Friedrich Thiersch,
"Ober die Sprache der Zakonen," in Abhandlungen der Akademie der
Wissenschaften (Munich, 1835), 511ff.
108. Thiersch, VEtat actuel de la Grece) vol. 1,198.
109. Thiersch, VEtat actuel de la Grece, vol. 1, 194.
110. Thiersch, VEtat actuel de la Greee, vol. 1, 325.
Ill. Williamson, Longingfor Myth in Germany, 145-48.
112. See Friedrich Schlegel, Ober die Sprache und die Weisheit der Indier, and
Peter von Bohlen, Das alte Indien, mit besonderer Rucksicht aUf
Aegypten,2 vots. (Konigsberg: Gebruder Borntrager, 1830).
113. Karl Otfried Muller, "Ueber den angeblich agyptischen Ursprung der
griechischen Kunst," in Kleine deutsche Schriften uber Religion, Kunst,
Sprache und Literatur, Leben und Geschichte des Alterthums, ed. Eduard
MUller (Ncw York: Georg Olms, 1979),2:524.
114. Karl Otfried MUller, "Ueber den angeblich agyptischen Ursprung," 534.
115. Karl Otfried Muller, "Ueber den angeblich agyptischen Ursprung." 526.
116. Karl Otfried MUller, "Ueber den angeblich agyptischen Ursprung," 536.
117. Josine H. Blok, "Proof and Persuasion in Black Athena I: The Case ofK.
O. Muller," in "Black Athena: Ten Years After," ed. Wim M. ]. van Bins-
bergen, Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical
Society, vol. xxviii-xxix (1996-97): 189.

337
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

U8. Karl Otfried Muller, "Ueber den angeblich agyptischen Ursprung," 533.
119. Karl Otfried Muller, "Ueber den angeblich agyptischen Ursprung," 536.
120. Karl Otfried Muller, Orchomenos und die Minyer: Geschichte Hellenischer
Stiimme und Stiidte (Graz: Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt,
1969), 1:2.
121. Karl Otfried Muller, Orchomenos und die Minyer, 1:2.
122. Karl Otfried Muller, Die Dorier: Geschichte Hellenischer Stamme und
Stadte (Graz: Akademische Druck-Ulld Verlagsanstalt, 1969), 2:l.
123. Karl Otfried Muller, Die Dorier, 2:1.
124. Karl Otfried Muller, Die Dorier, 2:16.
125. Martin Bernal's assertion that Muller took no notice of new develop-
ments in fields related to the classics is incorrect; Mtiller's turn away from
Egypt should not be seen as the result of purely "externalist reasons,"
such as racism or a belief in progress (Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1987], 1:315-16).
126. Karl Otfried Muller, "Friedrich Thiersch: Uber die Epochen der bilden-
den Kunst unter den Griechen," in Kleine deutsche Schriften, 2: 318.
127. In 1836, for example, Muller praised Raphael Kuhner's attempt to apply
the techniques of historical grammar developed by Jacob Grimm to
school grammars of the Greek language, demonstrating a thorough
knowledge of the significance of sound shifts for etymology, as well as of
the value of comparing the inflection patterns of Greek and other Indo-
European verbs. See Karl Otfried Muller, "AusfUhrliche Grammatik der
Griechischen Sprache wissenschaftlich und mit Rucksicht auf den Schul-
gebrauch ausgearbeitet von Raphael Kuhner," in Kleine deutsche
Schriftcn, 1:336ff. See also Karl Otfried Milller, "Lehre von den Par-
tikeln der griechischen Sprache von J. A. Hartung," in Kleine deutsche
Schriften, 1 :327tf.
128. Karl Otfried Milller, "Acta Societatis Graecae," Kleine deutsche Schriften,
1:12.
129. Karl Otfried Milller, "Acta Societatis Graecae," 1:12.
130. Bernal, Black Athena, 1:310 and 314f
131. Karl Otfried Muller, "Acta Societatis Graecae," 1:13.
132. Karl Otffied Milller, "Acta Societatis Graecae," 1:8-9.
133. Karl Otfried Muller, Die Etrusker (Graz: Akademische Druck-und Ver-
lagsanstalt, 1965), 1:9-10.
134. Karl Otfried Milller, Geschichte der griechischen Literatttr bis aUf das
Zeitalter Alexanders, ed. Eduard Muller (Breslau: Josef Max und Komp.,
1841),1:8.
135. Karl Otfried Milller, Geschichte der griechischen [,iteratur, 1 :5.
136. Karl Otfried Milller, Handbuch der Archaologie der Kunst (Breslau: Josef

338
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

Max und Komp., 1848),257.

137. Karl Otfried Miiller, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1825), 336.
138. Karl Otfried Miiller, "Friedrich Thiersch. Uber die Epochen der bilden-
den Kunst unter den Grieehen," in Kleine deutsche Schriften, 2:319.
139. Edgar Quinet, Oeuvres complete de Edgard Quinet, vol. I, Le Genie des
Religions (Paris: Librairie Germer-Bailliere, 1877),56.
140. Friedrich Gottlieb Wekker, "Ueber die Bedeutung der Philologie," in
Kleine Schriften zur griechischen Literaturgeschichte (Osnabnlck: Otto
Zeller, 1973),4:2-3.
141. Wekker, "Ueber die Bedeutung der Philologie," 4:4-5.
142. Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Griechische Gotterlehre (Gottingen: Dieter-
ischc Buchhandlung, 1857-63), 1:10.
143. August Boeckh, "Von der Philologie, besonders der klassischen in
Beziehung zur morgenHindischen: Rede zur ErOffnung der elften Ver-
sammlung Deutscher Philologen, Schulmanner und Orientalisten, gehal-
ten zu Berlin am 30. September 1850," in Kleine Schriften, 2:188-89.
144. Georg Curtius, "Philologie und Sprachwissenschaft," in Georg Curtius,
Kleine Schriften, ed. Ernst Windisch, vol. I, Ausgewahlte Reden und
Vortrage (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1886), 149.
145. See Ernst Windisch, Georg Curtius: Eine Charakteristik (Berlin: Calvary
& Co., 1887), as well as Georg Curtius, Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprach-
forschung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1885).
146. Georg Curtius, The Results of Comparative Philology in Reference to Clas-
sical Scholarship, trans. F. H. Trithen (Oxford: Francis Macpherson,
1851),4.
147. Curtius, Results of Comparative Philology, 31.
148. Sebastiana Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann's Method, ed. and trans.
Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 122.
149. CurtillS, Results of Comparative Philology, 10.
150. Curtius, Results of Comparative Philology, 59.
151. Curtius, Results of Comparative Philology, 8.
152. Curtius, "Philologie lind Sprachwissenschaft," 137.
153. Curtius, "Philologie lind Sprachwissenschaft," 147.
154. Curtius, "Philologie und Sprachwisscnschaft," 143.
155. Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 637.
156. Adolf Deissmann, Bible Studies: Contributions Chiefly from Papyri and
Inscriptions to the History of the Language, the Literature, and the Reli-
gion of Hellenistic Judaism and Primitive Christianity, trans. Alexander
Grieve (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1901), 173.
IS 7. Deissmann, Bible Studies, 63.
158. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background

339
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

and History (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1973), 597-606.

159. Richard Rothe, Zur Dogmatik (Gotha: Perthes, 1863),238. The English
translation is from Stanley E. Porter, The Language of the New Testa-
ment: Classic Essays (Sheftleld: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 51.
160. Hermann Cremer, Biblisch-theologisches Worterbuch der neutestamentis-
chen Griicitat (Gotha: F. A. Perthes), xv.
161. Georg Benedikt Winer, A Treatise on the Grammar of New Testament
Greek: Regarded as a Sure Basis for New Testament Exegesis, trans. W. F.
Moulton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1882),2-3.
162. Deissmann, Bible Studies, 70-77.
163. See J. M. Rife, "The Greek Language of the New Testament," in The
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1982),2:571.

Chapter 5

1. Ludwig Schemann, Gobineaus Rassenwerk: Aktenstucke und Betrachtun-

gen zur Geschichte und Kritik des Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines
(Stuttgart: Fr. Fromann, 1910), 117-18.
2. See the chapter titled "The Different Languages are Unequal, and Cor-
respond pertectly in relative merit to the races that use them," in Arthur
Comte de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, trans.
Adrian Collins (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967), esp. 188, 193, 196,
203-4. See also Ulrich Rieken, "Sprachtheoretische und weltan-
schauliche Rezeption der Aufklarung bei August Friedrich Pott
(1802-1887)," in History and Historiography of Linguistics, ed. Hans-
Josef Niederehe and Konrad Koerner, 2:619-32 (Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 1990).
3. Cited in Schemann, Gobineaus Rassenwerk, 117.
4. Friedrich August Pott, Die Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen hauptsiich-
lich vom sprachwissenschaftlichen Standpunkte, unter besonderer Beruck-
sichtigung von des Grafen von Gobineau gleichnamigem Werke (Lemgo:
Meyer'sche Hofbuchhandlung, 1956).
5. Schemann, Gobineaus Rassenwerk, 117ff.
6. Many histories of Aryan racial theory draw direct lines of continuity link-
ing Germany's Oriental Renaissance to the violent anti-Semitism of the
Third Reich. According to Leon Poliakov, Raymond Schwab, and Rene
Gerard, German Orientalists wrongly translated observations of linguis-
tic affinity into a fatal theory of racial descent. Raymond Schwab, for
example, readily drew on the metaphor of "language as a weapon of
war," generalizing that the "confusion of linguistic facts and ethnic the-
ories perpetuated ... more ravages than ... the wars offaith" (Raymond

340
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the

East 1680-1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking [New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 184-87). Both he and Rene
Gerard believed they were able to identity a particular German affinity
for the "irrational," the "unconscious," and the "mystic," virtues sup-
posedly extolled in Indian texts (Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, 482-84;
Rene Gerard, L'Orient et la pensee romantique allemande [Paris: M.
Didier, 1963], 1-2,257). Leon Poliakov put an "emphasis on biology,"
a basic element of Aryan theory as it was formulated by Friedrich
Schlegel, and assumed that a conflation of the concepts of language and
race had already taken place in the first German empire (Poliakov, Aryan
Myth, 197 and 74t). He likewise justified "short-circuiting fifteen cen-
turies of history" with the claim that the roots of Nazi racism could be
found in pre-Christian Germanic myths of origin (Poliakov, Aryan Myth,
4-5).
7. Pott, "Indogermanischer Sprachstamm," 79.
8. Pott, "Indogermanischer Sprachstamm," 26.
9. Hans Siegert, "Zur Geschichte der Begriffe 'Arier' und 'arisch, '" Wiirter
und Sachen: ZeitschriJt fur Indogermanische Sprachwissenscahft, Volks-
forschung und Kultur,geschichte n.s. 4 (1941-42), 84.
10. Friedrich Schlegel, "Uber den Anfang unserer Geschichte und die letzte
Revolution der Erde, als wahrscheinliche Wirkung eines Kometen. Von
J. G. Rhode," Jahrbucher der Literatur 8 (1819),459.
11. Friedrich Schlegel, "Uber den Anfang unserer Geschichte," 454, 452.
12. Friedrich Schlegel, "Uber den Anfang unserer Geschichte," 458-59.
13. Friedrich Schlegel, "Uber den Anfang unserer Geschichte," 459-60.
14. Christian Lassen, "Uber Herrn Professor Bopps grammatisches System
der Sanskrit-Sprache," Indische Bibliothek 3 (1830), 70.
15. Lassen, "Uber Hopps grammatisches System," 70-71.
16. August Wilhelm Schlegel, "De l'origine des Hindous," 474-75.
17. August Wilhelm Schlegel, "De l'origine des Hindous," 469.
18. August Wilhelm Schlegel, "De l'origine des Hindous," 473.
19. August Wilhelm Schlegel, "De l'origine des Hindous," 515-16.
20. Christian Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde (Bonn: H. B. Konig, 1847),
1:388.
21. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:390-91.
22. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:388.
23. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:385.
24. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:390-91.
25. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:390,514.
26. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:387, 389, 401.
27. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:400,408.

341
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

28. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:513.

29. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1 :411.
30. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:414.
31. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1 :417.
32. Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, 1:414-16.
33. John E. Joseph, "Language, Body, Race: From Aristotle and Epicurus to
Descartes and Locke" (paper prepared for the Young Scholars' Summer
Institute on the Concept of Language, Research Triangle Park, N.C.,
August 2003).
34. See JetTrey Wallack, The Noblest Animate Motion: Speech, Physiology and
Medicine in Pre-Cartesian Linguistic Thought (Philadelphia: John Ben-
jamins, 1997).
35. Joseph, "Language, Body, Race," 18.
36. Charles Bouton, Neurolinguisitcs: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives,
trans. Terence MacNamee (New York: Plenum, 1991),68-75.
37. Romer, SprachwisscrtSchaft und Rassf1lideologie, 132.
38. Pott, Die Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, 41.
39. August Friedrich Pott, Anti-](aulf1l oder Mythische Vorstellungen vom
Ursprunge der VOlker und Sprachen (Lemgo: Meyer'sche Hofbuchhand-
lung, 1863),298.
40. August Friedrich Port, Einleitung in die allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft:
Zur Literatur der Sprachkunde Europas, ed. E. F. K. Koerner (Amster-
dam: John Benjamins, 1974),202.
41. Pott, Anti-](aulen, 291.
42. Pott, Anti-](aulen, 171.
43. Rieken, "Sprachtheoretische und weltanschauliche Rezeption der Au&,-
Iarung," 620.
44. Delbriick, Introduction to the Study of Language, 35.
45. Pott, Etymologische Forschungen, 1 :xxiv.
46. Pott, Eymologische Forschungen, 1 :xxv.
47. Pott, Eymologische Forschungf1l, 1:xxv.
48. Pott, Eymologische Forschungen, 1:xxvii.
49. Pott, Eymologische Forschungen, 1 :xxvi-xxvii.
50. Pott, Eymologische Forschungen, 1 :xxv.
51. Pott, Etymologische Forschungen, 1 :xiii.
52. Pott, Eymologische Forschungen, 1 :xxi.
53. Pott, "Indogermanischer Sprachstamm," 1.
54. August Friedrich Pott, Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asien. Ethno-
graphisch-linguistische Untersuchung vornehmlich ihrer Herkunft und
Sprache (Halle: Ed. Heynemann, 1844), 1:58.
55. Pan, Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asif1l, xv. Twentieth-century linguists
actually see the relationship to be much closer, classifYing the sixty or

342
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

more dialects of Romany as Indo-Aryan languages spoken by peoples of

non-Aryan descent. See the article "Romani," in Asher and Simpson,
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 7:3603-4.
56. Siegert, "Zur Geschichte der Begriffe 'Arier' und 'arisch,'" 90ff.
57. Siegert, "Zur Geschichte der Begriffe 'Arier' und 'arisch,'" 97.
58. Bouton, Neurolinguisitcs, 138-43, 147.
59. Romer, Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie, 132-33.
60. Romer, Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie, 134.
61. Romer, Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie, 126-29.
62. Pott, Etymologische Forschungen, l:xxv.
63. Pott, Etymologische Forschungen, 2:ix.
64. Pott, Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, vii, x, viii.
65. Pon, Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, 8, 178.
66. Pott, Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, xxxiii.
67. Pott, Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, 81.
68. Pott, Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, 84.
69. Pott, Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, 183.
70. Pott, Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, 85-86.
71. See Pott's essays in the Zeitschrift der deutschen mot;genliindischen
Gesellschaft, vols. 2, 6, 5, 8: "Ueber das verwandtschaftliche VerhaltniB
zwischen den Kasser-und Kongo-Sprachen"; "Ueber die Kihiau-
Sprache"; "Die Sprachen Siidafrikas"; and "Sprachen aus Mrikas Innern
und Westen."
72. Pott, Ungleichheit menschlicher Rassen, 88. His article "Sprachen aus
Mrika's Inneren und Westen" (1854) had attracted Gobineau's attention
because it cited him.
73. Hutton, introduction to History of Linguistics, 4:xxi.
74. See Williamson, Longingfor Myth in Germany, 74, 217-19.
75. Hannah Franziska Augstein, "Linguistics and Politics in the Early Nine-
teenth Century: James Cowles Prichard's Moral Philology," History of
European Ideas 23, no. 1 (1997): 1-18.
76. Hannah Franziska Augstein, "Aspects of Philology and Racial Theory in
Nineteenth-Century Celticism-the Case of James Cowles Prichard,"
Journal of European Studies 28, no. 4 (1998): 366.
77. James Cowles Prichard, "On the various methods of Research which
contribute to the Advancement of Ethnology, and of the relations ofthat
Science to other branches of Knowledge," in Report of the British Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science (London: John Murray, 1848),
230-53.
78. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 132.
79. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 171.
80. Aarsleff, Study of Language in England, 166ff.

343
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

81. J. W. Burrow, "The Uses of Philology in Victorian England," in Ideas

and Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. Robert Robson (London: G.
Bell & Sons, 1967), 194-97.
82. Friedrich Max Miiller, "Comparative Mythology" (1856), in Chips from
a German Workshop, vol. 2, Essays on the Science of Religion (London:
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1867), 19.
83. Friedrich Max Miiller, "On the Relation of the Bengali to the Arian and
Aboriginal Languages of India," in Report of the Seventeenth Meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1847 (London:
John Murray, 1848),325.
84. Max Miiller, "On the Relation," 327.
85. This is Thomas Trautmann's term, Aryans and British India, 173.
86. Max Miiller, "On the Relation," 347.
87. Max Miiller, "On the Relation," 321.
88. Max Miiller, "On the Relation," 328.
89. Max Miiller, "On the Relation," 330,348.
90. Max Muller, "On the Relation," 349.
91. Friedrich Max Muller, Suggestions for the Assistance of Officers in Learn-
ing the Languages of the Scat of War in the East {London: Longman,
Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1854),29-30.
92. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt.
Hon. Friedrich Max Muller, Pc. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974),
316ff.
93. Bunsen, Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, 1 :349-52.
94. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 197,212.
95. Friedrich Max Muller, "Inaugural Lecture. On the Results of the Science
of Language," delivered to the Imperial University of Strassburg, 23
May 1873, in Chips from a German Workshop, vol. 3, Essays on Literature,
Biography, and Antiquities (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870),
187.
96. George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987),
67.
97. Adalbert Kuhn, "Die sprachvergleichung und die urgeschichte der
indogermanischen volker," Zeitschrift fiir vergleichende Sprachforschung
auf dem Gebiete des Deutschen, Gricchischen und Lateinischen 4 (1855),
81.
98. Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, 32.
99. Friedrich Max Muller, Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas
(London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1887),89-90.
100. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Friedrich Max
Miillcr (New York: MacMillan, 1907), Ixxvii.
101. See the genealogy Max Muller himself gave for his understanding oflan-

344
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

guage and thought in The Science of Thought (London: Longsmans,

Green, and Co., 1887), 43-45.
102. Max Milller, Science of Thought, 26-29, 30, 548-49.
103. Max Milller, Science of Thought, 83.
104. Max Milller, Science of Thought, 419.
105. Friedrich Max Milller, Lectures on the Science of Language (London:
Longmans, Green, and Co, 1866),396.
106. Ronald W. Neufeldt, Friedrich Max Muller and the Rg- Veda: A Study of
Its Role in His Work and Thought (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1980),
109-12.
107. Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 394.
108. Joseph M. Kitagawa and John S. Strong, "Friedrich Max Muller," in
Nineteenth-Century Re/igious Thought in the West, ed. Ninian Smart
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985),3:199-202.
109. Friedrich Max Muller, "Semitic Monotheism" (1860), in Chips from a
German Workshop, 1 :352.
110. Max MUller, "Semitic Monotheism," 1 :357.
Ill. Friedrich Max MUller, A History ofAncient Sanskrit Literature (London:
Williams and Norgate, 1859),3.
112. Max MUller, History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, 14-15.
113. Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Ger-
many (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001),48.
114. Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism, 135fT.
115. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 184-87.
116. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 178-81; and Schrader, Sprachver-
gleichung und Ut;geschichte, 90-91.
117. Schrader, Sprachvet;gleichung und Ut;geschichte, 102-3.
118. Friedrich Delitzsch, Studien uber indogermanisch-semitische Wurze/ver-
wandtschaft (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1873), 3-21.
119. In the foreword to August Fick, Worterbuch der indogermanischen
Grundsprache in ihrem Bestande vor der VOIkertrennung: Ein
sprachgeschichtlicher Versuch (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1868), ix. See also Schrader, Sprachvet;gleichung und Ut;geschichte, 92.
120. Lazarus Geiger, "Uber die Ursitze der Indogermanen," in Zur Entwick-
lungsgeschichte der Menschheit, 113-50 (Stuttgart: 1. G. Cotta, 1878); see
also Schrader, Sprachvet;gleichung und Ut;geschichte, 93-94.
121. J. c. Cuno, Forschungen im Gebiete der Vo/kerkunde (Berlin: Gebruder
Borntrager, 1871); see also Schrader, Sprachvct;glcichung und
Ut;geschichte, 97-98.
122. Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Ut;geschichte, 101.
123. Schrader, Sprachl'ergleichung und Urgeschichte, 110-12, 116-17.
124. Cited in Rolf Peter Sieferle, "Indien und die Arier in der Rassentheorie,"

345
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

Zeitschriftfiir Kulturaustausch 37 (1987): 453.

125. Williamson, Longingfor Myth in Germany, 224.
126. James Darmesteter, Essais Orientaux (Paris: Librairie Centrale des Beaux-
Arts, 1883),3-4,29-31.
127. Prussia offered its Orientalists comparable university support, but the
first seminar for Oriental languages was not founded until after unifica-
tion and the onset of German imperialism in 1887.
128. In 1754 he had joined the East India Company as a mercenary solider,
hoping to discover Veda manuscripts, but war confined him to studying
Farsi in Surate. Yet in 1761 Anquetil-Duperron returned to France with
180 manuscripts in Avestan, Farsi, Sanskrit, and Pahlavi.
129. Lionel Gossman notes an exception to this in La Curne de Sainte-
Palaye's work on Old French and Proven\alliterature. See Lionel Goss-
man, Medievalism and the Ideologies afthe Enlightenment: The World and
Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1968).
130. Darmsteter, Essais Orientaux, 33-34.
131. Darmsteter, Essais Orientaux, 23.
132. Eugene Burnouf, "De la langue et de la litterature sanscrite," Revue des
deux mondes 1 (1833): 275.
133. Jean Pommier, La Jeunesse clericale d)Ernest Renan (Paris: Les Belles Let-
tres, 1933), ll8.
134. Ernest Renan, "Souveniers d'Enfance et de Jeunesse," in Oeuvres Com-
pUtes, 2:869.
135. Renan, "Souveniers d'Entance et de Jeunesse," 2:864.
136. Ernest Renan, "Histoire generale et systemes compares des langues semi-
tiques," in Oeuvres Completes, 8:140.
137. Ernest Renan, "Nouvelles Considerations sur le caractere general des
peoples semitique, et en particulier sur leur tendance au monotheism,"
Journal Asiatique (1859),446,448-49.
138. Ernest Renan, "Histoire du peuplc d'lsraCl," in Oeuvres Completes, 6:32.
139. Ernest Renan, "Des services rendus par la philologie," Oeuvres Completes,
8:1224, 1230.
140. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:577-78.
141. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:586-87.
142. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:577.
143. Ernest Renan, "De I'origine du langue," in Oeuvres Comptetes, 8:37.
144. Renan, "De I'origine du langue," 8:59-61.
145. Renan, "De l'origine du langue," 8:53.
146. Renan, "De l'origine du langue," 8:46-47.
147. Renan, "De l'origine du langue," 8:55-56.
148. See especially the following passages: Renan, "De l'origine du langue,"
8:57-59; and Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:538-44.

346
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

149. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:544-45.

ISO. Renan, "De I'origine du langue," 8:58-59.
151. Renan, "De I' origine du langue," 8 :61.
IS2. Renan, "De l'origine du langue," 8:63.
lS3. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:137.
lS4. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:529-30.
IS5. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:541.
156. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:517.
157. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:522.
158. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:157.
lS9. Renan, "De I'origine du langue," 8:55.
160. Renan, "De l'origine du langue," 8:97.
161. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8: 157.
162. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:145.
163. Renan, "Nouvelles Considerations," 430-32.
164. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8: 144-45.
165. Renan, "De l'origine du langue," 8:147.
166. Renan, "De l'origine du langue," 8:97.
167. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:146.
168. Renan, "Histoire generale," 8:155-56. Renan believed Lassen had con-
firmed his thesis independently. But whether Renan had truly written his
analysis before discovering the German author as claimed is question-
able. Many defining passages in the Histoire were lifted word for word
from the earlier Origin, but the latter text showed no hint of the sharp
foils Renan drew between Aryans and Semites in 1855.
169. Renan, "De l'origine du langue," 8:98.
170. Olender, Languages of Pa/'adise, 69-70.
171. Cited in Olender, Languages of Paradise, 69.
172. Ernest Renan, "Marc-AureIe et la Fin du Monde Antique," in Oeuvres
Completes, 5:1142.
173. August Schleicher, Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht
(1850), in Sprachver;gleichende Untersuchungen (Frankfurt: Minerva,
1983),1-3.
174. Salomon Letinann, August Schleicher: Skizze (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner,
1870),7,15.
175. Robins, Short History of Linguistics, 197.
176. Sebastiana Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann 's Method, 119.
177. G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philos-
ophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Englewood Cliffs, N .J.: Pren-
tice, 1997), 78.
178. Hegel, Reason in History, 74.
179. Hegel, Reason in History, 77.

347
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

180. August Schleicher, "Zur vergleichenden Sprachengeschichte," in

Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen, 20-21.
181. Schleicher, "Zur vergleichenden Sprachengeschichte," 17-18.
182. Gardt, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland, 281.
183. Schleicher, "Zur vergleichenden Sprachengeschichte," 22.
184. Robins, Short History of Linguistics, 197.
185. Schleicher, "Eine Fabel in indogermanischer Ursprache," Beitrage zur
vergleichenden Sprachforschung aUf dem Gebiete der arischen, celtischen
und slawischen Sprachen 5 (1868),206.
186. The twentieth-century decipherment of the Hittite script, for example,
used in Anatolia during the second millennium Be, uncovered the first
known Indo- European language to have separated from the common
mother and substantially revised its forms. See Robins, Short History of
Linguistics, 199.
187. Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann)s Method, 121-22.
188. August Schleicher, "Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen
Urvolks," Kieler Allgemeine Monatsschrift fur Wissenschaft und Literatur
(1853): 786--87; see also Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte,
54.
189. See Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image.
190. Robins, Short History of Linguistics) 198.
191. Dialects were always depicted as having evolved latest in Schleicher's lin-
guistic tree; Schmidt accounted for their presence early in a language's
history by considering geographic encounters among groups of speakers.
See Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, 64-65.
192. Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann)s Method, 126.
193. August Schleicher, Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language, trans.
Alex Bikkers (London: J. c. Hatten, 1869),21.
194. Schleicher, Die Sprachen Europas, 2.
195. Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 138.
196. Max Milller, The Science of Language, 42.
197. Schleicher, "Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language," 62, 64.
198. Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, 74-76.
199. Elizabeth Knoll, "The Science of Language and the Evolution of the
Mind: Max Muller's Quarrel with Darwinism," Journal of the History of
the Behavioral Sciences 22, no. 1 (1986): 6.
200. Knoll, "Science of Language," 10-12.
201. Max MUller, Science of Language, 392.
202. August Schleicher, "On the Significance of Language for the Natural
History of Man" (1865), trans. J. Peter Maher, in Linguistics and Evo-
lutionary Theory, 76.

348
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

203. Schleicher, "On the Significance of Language," 78-79.

204. See Carl Meinhof, Grundrifi einer Lautlehre der Bantusprachen (Berlin:
D. Reimer, 1899); and Grundzuge einer vet;gleichenden Grammatik der
Bantusprachen (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1906).
205. Sara Pugach, "Mrikanistik and Colonial Knowledge: Carl Meinhof, the
Missionary Impulse, and Mrican Language and Culture Studies in Ger-
many, 1887-1919" (Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 258.
206. See Pugach, "Afrikanistik and Colonial Knowledge," especially chapter
two.
207. Sara Pugach, "Carl Meinhof and the German Influence on Nicholas van
Warmelo's Ethnograophic and Linguistic Writing, 1927-35," Journal of
Southern African Studies 30, no. 4 (2004): 825-45.
208. Hermann Osthotf and Karl Brugman, Morphotogische Untersuchungen
auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen (Leipzig: S. Hirzel,
1878),I:xii.
209. Osthoff and Brugman, 1 :iii.
210. Osthoff and Brugman, l:xiii.
211. Kurt R. Jankowsky, "Development of Historical Linguistics from Rask
and Grimm to the Neogrammarians," in Sprachtheorien der Neuzeit II·
Von der Grammaire de Port-Royal (1660) zur Konstitution moderner iin-
guistischer Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schmitter (Tiibingen: Gunter Narr,
1996),20.
212. Osthoff and Brugman, l:viii-ix.
213. Osthoff and Brugman, l:vi-vii.
214. Osthoff and Brugman, l:xiii.
215. Hermann Osthoff, "Das physiologische und psychologische Moment in
der sprachlichen Furmenbildung," Sammlung gemei11verstiindlicher wis-
senschaftlicher Vortriige von Virchow und HotzendorfJ327 (1879): 8.
216. Osthoff and Brugman, 1 :xiv.
217. Hermann Osthoff, Das Verbum in der Nominalkomposition im
Deutschen, Griechischen, Slavishen und Romanischen (Jena: H. Costeno-
ble, 1878), 326.
218. Gerhard Helbig, Geschichte der neueren Sprachwissenschaft: Unter dem
besondern Aspekt der Grammatik-Theorie (Leipzig: VEB Bibliographis-
ches Institut, 1973), 19.
219. Osthoft~ "Das physiologische und psychologische Moment," 13-14.
220. Osthoff, "Das physiologische und psychologische Moment," 15-16.
221. Osthoft~ "Das physiologische und psychologische Moment," 19-20.
222. Osthoft~ "Das physiologische und psychologische Moment," 5.
223. Herman Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 2nd edition (Halle: M.
Niemeyer, 1886), 1.

349
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

Chapter 6

1. Ferdinand de Saussure, "Souvenirs de F. de Sallssllre concernant sa

jeunesse et ses etudes," Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 17 (1960): 22.
2. See Williamson, Longing for Myth in Germany, 219-29.
3. Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1994),98.
4. Wilhelm Max Wundt, VOikerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwick-
lungsgesetze von Sprache, My thus und Sitte, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Wilhelm
Engelmann, 1900-1909).
5. Williamson, Longingfor Myth in Germany, 220.
6. Cited in Johann Karl Kretzschmer, Friedrich Wilhelm 111: Sein Leben, sein
Wirken und seine Zeit: Ein Erinnerungsbuch fur das preussische Volk
(Danzig: Friedrich Samuel Gerhard, 1842),2:289.
7. Vick, Defining Germany, 110.
8. Ingrid Belke, ed., Moritz Lazarus und Heymann Steinthal: Die Begrun-
der der VOikerpsychologie in ihren Briefen (Ttibingen: J. c. B. Mohr,
1983),I:xv.
9. Moritz Lazarus, Die sittliche Berechtigung Preujens in Deutschland
(Berlin: Carl Schultze, 1850), ix.
10. Lazarus, Die sittIiche Berechtigung Preujens, 104.
11. Lazarus, Die sittliche Berechtigung PreuJIens, 5.
12. Belke, Moritz Lazarus und Heymann Steinthal, 1 :58.
13. Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Stcinthal, "Einleitende Gedanken tiber
Volkerpsychologie, als Einladung zu einer Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsy-
chologie und Sprachwissenschaft," Zeitschrift fur Viilkerpsychologie und
Sprachwissenschaft 1 (1860/61): 9-10.
14. Moritz Lazarus, "Ueber den Begriff und die Moglichkeit einer Volker-
pyschologie," in Deutsches Museum: Zeitschrift fur Literatur, Kunst und
dffentliches Leben, ed. Robert Prutz (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buch-
handlung, 1851), 112-13.
15. Moritz Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zurVolkerpsychologie,"
Zeitschrift fur Viilkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 3 (1865): 26-27.
16. Georg Eckardt, cd., Vdlkerpsychologie-Versuch einer Neuentdeckung:
Texte von Lazarus, Stein thai, und Wundt (Weinheim: Psychologie Ver-
lags Union, 1997),25,74.
17. Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 52.
18. Heymann Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologie: Ihre Principien
und ihr Verhiiltniss zu Einander (Berlin: Ferdinand Diimmler, 1855),
391-92.
19. Lazarus, "Einige synthctischc Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 41.

350
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

20. Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 40.

21. Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 36.
22. Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 35.
23. Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 35.
24. Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 35.
25. Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 32.
26. Lazarus, "Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Volkerpsychologie," 39.
27. Moritz Lazarus, Was heiflt national? (Berlin: Ferdinand Diimmler,
1880),21.
28. Leszek Belzyt, Sprachliche Minderheiten im preuflischen Staat,
J8 J5- J9 J4: Die preuflische Sprachenstatistik in Bearbeitung und J( om-
mentar (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 1998),9.
29. Richard Bockh, "Die statistische Bedeutung der Volkssprache als
Kennzeichen der Nationalitat," Zeitschrift fur Vijlkerpsychologie 4 (1866):
265.
30. Bockh, "Die statistische Bedeutung der Volkssprache," 264.
31. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 99.
32. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 99.
33. Ahlzweig, Muttersprache- Vaterland, 165, 170.
34. Eva Rimmele, Sprachenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich vor 1914:
Regierungspolitik und verdffentlichte Meinung in Elsafl-Lothringen und
den iistlichen Provinzen Preuflens (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), 166.
35. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 129.
36. Rimmele, Sprachenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 166.
37. Chickering, "Language and the Social Foundations of Radical National-
ism," 76.
38. Cited in Puschner, Die vdlkische Bewegung, 29.
39. Chickering, "Language and the Social Foundations," 74.
40. Puschner, Die vdlkische Bewegung, 30ff.
41. Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbu1lJertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Gen-
esisdesdeutschen Nationalstaates(Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1911), 1-20.
42. Heymann Steinthal, Die Classification der Sprachen, dargestellt als die
Entwickelung der Sprachidee (Berlin: Ferdinand Diimmler, 1850), 16.
See also Waltraud Bumann, Die Sprachtheorie Heymann Steinthals,
da1lJestellt im Zusammenhang mit seiner Theorie der Geisteswissenschaften
(Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1966), 18.
43. Steinthal, Die Classification der Sprachen, 17.
44. Heymann Steinthal, Der Ursprung der Sprache im Zusammenhange mit
den letzten Fragen alles Wissens, Eine Darstellung, Kritik und Fortent-
wickelung der vorzuglichsten Ansichten (Berlin: Ferdinand Diimmler,
1888), 106.
45. Heymann Steinthal, "Offenes Sendschreiben an Herrn Professor Pott"

351
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

(1852), in Kleine Sprachtheoretische Schriften, ed. Waltraud Bumann

(New York: Georg Olms, 1970), 5.
46. Steinthal, Die Classification der Sprachen, 24.
47. See Heymann Steinthal, "Philologie, Geschichte und Psychologie in
ihren gegenseitigen Beziehungen," in Kleine sprachthcorctischc Schriften,
436-511.
48. Steinthal, Der Ursprung dcr Sprachc, 109.
49. Steinthal, Der Ursprung der Sprache, 109.
50. Steinthal, Dcr Ursprung dcr Sprachc, 109.
51. Heymann Steinthal, "Zur Charakteristik der semitischen Volker,"
Zcitschrift fur VOikerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (1860):
328-45.
52. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologic, 234.
53. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologic, 47.
54. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologic, 232.
55. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologie, 295, 298.
56. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologic, 235.
57. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologic, 306.
58. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologie, 319-23.
59. Steinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 270.
60. Steinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 270.
61. Steinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 279.
62. Steinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 270.
63. Steinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 296.
64. Heymann Steinthal, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. I of Einleitung in
die Psychologie und Sprachwisscnschaft (Berlin: Ferdinand Diimmler,
1871),370.
65. Steinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 295.
66. Stcinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 296.
67. Steinthal, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, 285.
68. Steinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 303.
69. Stein thai, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 297.
70. Moritz Lazarus, "Verdichtung des Denkens in der Geschichte: Ein Frag-
ment," Zcitschriftfur VOlkcrpsychologic und Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1863):
67.
71. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologie, 374.
72. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologie, 375.
73. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologie, 375.
74. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologic, 380.
75. Steinthal, "Zur Sprachphilosophie," 303.
76. Steinthal, Die Classification der Sprachen, 74.
77. Steinthal, Die Classification der Sprachen, 91.

352
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

78. See Heymann Steinthal, Die Mande-Neger-Sprachen: Psychologisch und

Phonetisch Betrachtet (Berlin: ferdinand Diimmler, 1867).
79. Steinthal, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, 62.
80. Steinthal, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, 67.
81. Steinthal, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, 62.
82. Steinthal, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, 68.
83. Clemens Knobloch, Geschichte der psychologischen Sprachauffassung in
Deutschland von 1850 bis 1920 (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1988), 60;
and Eckardt, VOikerpsychologie, 21.
84. Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychologie, 137-38.
85. Bumann, Die Sprachtheorie Heymann Steinthals, 43.
86. See James 1. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000); and Manfred Riedel, ed., "!edes Wort
ist ein Vorurteil»: Philologie und Philosophie in Nietzsches Denken
(Cologne: Bohlau, 1999).
87. Federico Gerratana, '''Jetzt zieht mich das A1lgemein-Menschliche an':
Ein Streifzug durch Nietzsches Aufzeichnungen zu einer 'Geschichte der
litterarischen Studien,'" in "Centauren-Geburten» Wissenschajt, Kunst
und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, ed. Tilman Borsche, Federico
Gerratana, and Aldo Venturelli (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994),
343.
88. Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche's Fruhe Schriften, ed. Hans
Joachim Mette, Karl Schlechta, and Carl Koch (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1994),3:338.
89. Nietzsche, Fruhe Schriften, 5:268.
90. Nietzsche, Fruhe Schriften, 1 :369.
91. Nietzsche, Fruhe Schriften, 3:338.
92. Nietzsche, Fruhe Schriften, 5:268.
93. Nietzsche, Fruhe Schriften, 5: 195.
94. Nietzsche, Fruhe Schriften, 5:285.
95. Compare Nietzsche's obscure reference to "the bees-the anthill" in
"On the Origin of Language" (in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and
Language, ed. Sander Gilman, C. Blair, and D. Parent [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989],209), to Hartmann's passage: "Nur der
Masseninstinct kann sie (die Sprache) geschaffen haben, wie er im Leben
des Bienenstockes, des Thermited-und Armeisenhaufens waltet"
(Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten [Berlin: Carl
Duncker, 1873],258). See Claudia Crawford, The Beginnings of Nietz-
sche)s Theory of Language (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 18.
96. Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten, 260. See also the reference to
Steinthal in the index, as well as the numerous references to his essay on
the origin of language and to VOikerpsychologie generally.

353
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

97. Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten, 260.

98. Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten, 258.
99. Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten, 258-59.
100. Nietzsche, "On the Origin of Language," 209.
10 1.Crawford, Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory, 178.
102. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, trans.
Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956),32.
103. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 101.
104. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 45.
105. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Music and Words" (1871), trans. Walter Kauf-
mann, in Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the
Music ofthe Later Nineteenth Century, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1980), 107-8.
106. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 44.
107. Nietzsche, "On Music and Words," 109.
108. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 36.
109. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 109.
110. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 96, 121, 123.
Ill. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 119.
112. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 63-64.
113. See Ernst Behler, "Die Sprachthcorie des friihen Nietzsche," in Borsche,
Gerratana, and Venturelli, CCCentauren-Geburten," 102ff.
114. Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst (Hildesheim: Gerog Olms, 1961),
111.
115. Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 244.
116. Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 260.
117. Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 118ff.
118. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense"
(1873), in Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language,
247.
119. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 248.
120. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 248.
121. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 249.
122. See Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, xiii.
123. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 248.
124. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Description of Ancient Rhetoric" (1872-73), in
Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, 21, 23.
125. Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, xiv f.
126. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 250.
127. Michel Haar, "Nietzsche und die Sprache," in «fedes Wort ist ein Vor-
teuil": Philologie und Philosophie in Nietzsches Denken, ed. Manfred
Riedel (Cologne: B6hlau Verlag, 1999),68.

354
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

128. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 250-51.

129. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 252.
130. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 254.
131. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 255.
132. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying," 256.
133. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 79.
134. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 80.
135. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 8l.
136. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing
(New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 188.
137. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 154-55.
138. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 151.
139. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 163-64.
140. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 176.
141. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 178.
142. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 178-79.
143. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 197.
144. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 197.
145. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 218.
146. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 299.
147. Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche: Nachgelassene Fragmente,
1885-1887, in Friedrich Nietzsche: Siimtliche Werke. Kritische Studienaus-
gabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 12:98, 101.
148. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002),17-18.
149. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 49.
150. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998),28.
151. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 18.
152. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 36.
153. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 18.
154. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 102.
155. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 18.
156. Nietzsche, Tlvilight of the Idols, 18-19.
157. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 20.
158. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 19.
159. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 29.
160. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 35.
161. Daniel Muller, Wider die «Vernunft in der Sprache": Zum Verhiiltniss von
Sprachkritik und Sprachpraxis im Schreiben Nietzsches (Tubingen: Gunter

355
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

Narr, 1995), 62ff.

162. Crawford, Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory, xiv ff.
163. See for example, Edith Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism: Levi-Strauss
to Foucault (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
164. Junathan Culler, SauJJure (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976),96.
165. See Sheila Embleton, John E. Joseph, and Hans-Josef Niederehe, eds.,
The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences: Studies on the Transition
from Historical-Comparative to Structural Linguistics in Honour of E. F.
K. Koerner, vol. 1, Historiographical Perspectives (Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 1999); Konrad Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and
J)evelopment of His Linguistic Thought in Western Studies of Language
(Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1973); and Amserdamska, Schools of
Thought.
166. Saussure, "Souvenirs de F. de Saussure," 17.
167. Culler, Saussure, 66.
168. See Nerlich, Change in Language.
169. John E. Joseph, "Saussure's Meeting with Whitney, Berlin 1879,"
Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 42 (1988): 205ff.
170. Stephen George Alter, "William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Lan-
guage" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993), 346.
171. William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline
of Linguistic Science (New York: Dover, 1979), 146.
172. Whitney, Life and Growth of Language, 145.
173. Whitney, Life and Growth of Language, 146.
174. Whitney, L~fe and Growth of Language, 319.
175. Whitney, Life and Growth of Language, 145-46.
176. Konrad Koerner, "L'importance de William Dwight Whitney pour les
jeunes linguistes de Leipzig et pour Ferdinand de Saussure," in Konrad
Koerner, Saussurean Studies/Etudes Saussuriennes (Geneva: Editions
Slatkine, 1988), 3f.
177. Karl Brugmann, "Zum Gedachtniss W. D. Whitney's," Journal of the
American Oriental Society 19 (1897): 80.
178. Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure, 79-92.
179. Koerner, "Hermann Paul and Synchronic Linguistics," in Saussurian
Studies, 23.
180. Hermann Paul, Principles of the History of Language, trans. H. A. Strong
(College Park, Md.: McGrath Publishing, 1970),9.
181. Paul, Principles of the History of Language, xlviii.
182. Koerner, "Hermann Paul and Synchronic Linguistics," 28.
183. Paul, Principles of the History of Language, 2.
184. Paul, Principles of the History of Language, xlviii.
185. Paul, Principles of the History of Language, 2-3.

356
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

186. Paul, Principles of the History of Language, 9.

187. Koerner, "Hermann Paul and Synchronic Linguistics," 36.
188. Paul, Principles of the History of Language, xliii.
189. Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure, 112.
190. Paul, Principles of the History of Language, xliv.
191. Paul, Principles of the History of Language, 3.
192. Hans Aarsleff, "Breal vs. Schleicher," in From Locke to Saussure, 393.
193. Koerner, "French Influences on Saussure," in Saussurian Studies, 83.
194. Amserdamska, Schools of Thought, 236, 247.
195. Nerlich, Change in Language, 6.
196. Michel Breal, "On the Form and Function of Words" (1866), in Michel
Breal, Michel Breal.· The Beginnings of Semantics: Essays, Lectures and
Reviews (London: Duckworth, 1991),50.
197. Breal, "On the Form and Function of Words," 52.
198. Breal, "Language and Nationality," in Breal, Michel Breal, 201.
199. Breal, "Language and Nationality," 206.
200. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of
Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1972), 139.
201. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally
and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1959),4.
202. Saussure, Course,S.
203. Saussure, Course, 6.
204. Saussure, Course, 13.
205. Saussure, Course, 14.
206. Saussure, Course, 9,10.
207. Saussure, Course, 19.
208. Saussure, Course, 14.
209. Saussure, Course, 10.
210. Culler, Saussure, 35.
211. Saussure, Course, 75.
212. Saussure, Course, 80.
213. Saussure, Course, 81.
214. Saussure, Course, 7l.
215. Saussure, Course, 71.
216. Saussure, Course, 72.
217. Saussure, Course, 73.
218. Saussure, Course, Ill.
219. Saussure, Course, 117.
220. Saussurc, Course, 122.
221. Saussure, Course, 112.

357
 NOTES TO CONCLUSION

222. Saussure, Course, 112-13.

223. Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Develop-
ments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1977),20.
224. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the
Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 27-31.
225. Saussure, Course, 232.
226. Saussure, Course, 222.
227. Saussure, Course, 223.
228. Saussure, Course, 16.
229. Saussure, Course, 68.
230. Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, xii.
231. See Jameson, Prison-House of Language.

Conclusion

I. Antoine Meillet, "Ce que la linguistique doit aux savants allemands"

(1923), in Linguistique Historique et Lintuistique Generale (Paris: C.
Klincksieck, 1951), I: 159, 157.
2. Meillet, "Ce que la linguistique doit," 158-59.
3. Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue
Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (New York: Routledge, 1999),
IS.
4. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 18; and Utz Maas, "Die
Entwicklung der deutschsprachigen Sprachwissenschaft von 1900 bis
1950: Zwischen Professionalisierung und Politisierung," ZeitschriJt fur
Germanistische Linguistik 16 (1988): 263. See also Ulrich Ch. M. Thilo,
Rezeption und Wirkung des Cours de linguistique generale: Uberlegungen
zu Geschichte und Historiographie der Sprachwissenschaft (Tiibingen:
Gunter Narr, 1989).
5. Clemens Knobloch, Volkhafte Sprachforschung: Studien zum Umbau der
Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland zwischen 1918 und 1945 (Tiibingen:
Max Nieymeyer, 2005), 49.
6. Maas, "Die Entwicklung der deutschsprachigen Sprachwissenschaft,"
263.
7. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 17-19.
8. Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 52.
9. Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 120ff.
10. Marchand, Down from Olympus, 305ff.
II. Marchand, Down from Olympus, 261.
12. The langue of a given community could be seen as a guarantor of a com-

. 358
 NOTES TO CONCLUSION

mon mentality or identity because it supposedly provided all its ofmem-

bers with a shared stock of linguistically communicable ideas. See Roy
Harris, Saussure and His Interpreters (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2003), 203; and Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 18.
13. Hermand, Geschichte der Germanistik, 7S-76.
14. Cited in GreB, Germanistik und Politik, 132, 130.
IS. Marchand, Down from Olympus, 30S.
16. Bernhard Becker, Herder-Rezeption in Deutschland: Eine ideologiekrit-
ische Untersuchung (Saint Ingbert: Werner J. Rohrig, 1987), 116ff.
17. Marchand, Down from Olympus, 310.
18. Sengupta, From Salon to Discipline, 117.
19. Knobloch, Volkhafte Sprachforschung, 177.
20. Knobloch, Volkhafte Sprachforschung, 178.
21. Knobloch, Volkhafte Sprachforschung, 179.
22. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 190.
23. Houston Stuart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,
trans. John Lees (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), l:lv.
24. Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 1:22lff.
2S. George Mosse, introduction to Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nine-
teenth Century, 1:xvi.
26. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 16.
27. Maas, "Die Entwicklung der deutschsprachigen Sprachwissenschaft,"
256-57,260.
28. Maas, "Die Entwicklung der deutschsprachigen Sprachwissenschaft,"
262.
29. Knobloch, Volkhafte Sprachforschung, 59.
30. Knochloch, Volkhafte Sprachforschung, 58-59.
31. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 236.
32. Knobloch, Volkhafte Sprachforschung, 60-64.
33. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 246.
34. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 291, 304-5.
3S. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich, 212-32.
36. Leo Weisgerber, "Sprachwissenschaft als lebendige Kraft unserer Zeit,"
in Zur Grundlegung der ganzheitlichen Sprachauffassung Aufsiitze
1925-1933, ed. Helmut Gipper (Dusseldorf: Padagogischer Verlag
Schwann, 1964),388-91.
37. Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructural-
ism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 5.
38. Fran\=ois Dosse, History of Structuralism, trans. Deborah Glassman (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1 :60, 66.
39. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 392.
40. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 388.

359
 NOTES TO CONCLUSION

41. Dosse, History of Structuralism, xix.

42. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962),246--47.
43. Levi-Strauss, Savage Mind, 252_
44. Dossc, History of Structuralism, 333.
45. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-
ences, trans. R. D. Lang (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970),386-87.
46. Foucault, Order of Things, 387.
47. In Foucault's words: "a history of the different modes by which, in our
culture, human beings are made into subjects." Michel Foucault, "The
Subject and Power," afterword to H. L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds.,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1982), 208.
48. Foucault, Order of Things, 305.
49. Foucault, Order of Things, 305. See also Schrift, Nietzsche's French
Legacy, 45.
50. Schrift, Nietzsche's French Legacy, 375.
51. Schrift, Nietzsche's French Legacy, 4.
52. Schi-ift, Nietzsche's French Legacy, 5.
53. Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," in Language and Politics,
ed. Michael J. Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1984),
124-25.

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397
 Index
Aarsletf, Hans, 21, 275
Ablaut. See vowel modifications
Academies of Science: Bavarian, 77,
132, 178, 180; Danish, 122;
Russian, 65, 88, 89, 90, 92
Academy of Science, Prussian, 41, 67,
89,174,251; and French lin-
guistic thought, 30-31, 34, 35
Acta Societatis Graecae, 170, 187
Addresses to the German Nation
(Fichte),113
Adelung, Johann Christoph, 69, 70,
73,118,123,134,222
Aesthetica in Nuce (Hamann), 37
Afghanistan, 90
Afrikaans language, 231
Afro-Asiatic languages, 107
agency, linguistic, 151, 199-200,
,242-43,292; asserted, 27, 29,
272,276; and autonomy of lan-
guage, 12,44, 294; dismissed,
266,269-70, 277,281; and lan-
guage as system of signs, 16,
116,289
agglutination, 59,83,230-31,257
Ahlzweig, Claus,S, 249
Alemanic languages, 132
399
Alexander I, czar of Russia, 65, 89
Alsace-Lorraine, 249
Altdeutsche Wiilder (Grimms), 120,
122
Altenstein, Karl von, 97
Altertumswissenschaft. See classical
studies
American Indian languages. See
Native American languages
analogy, 156,237,275
anatomy, 151,205,209-10
Ancient History of the Germans
(Adelung), 70
Anderson, Benedict,S, 15
Angle dialect, 123
Anglo-Saxon language, 145, 149,213
Annals of Oriental Literature, 80
Anquetil- Duperron, Abraham-
Hyacinthe, 201, 222, 346n128
anthropology, 4,10,199,209-10;
and Indo- European homeland,
219-20; vs. philology, 219-21,
234; and race, 215-16, 219-21
Antihermes or Philosophical Investiga-
tions (Roth), 50
anti-Semitism, 101-3, 105, 109-11,
189,196,228,284
 INDEX
Arabic language, 93, 107, 187,
221-22, 229; in biblical philol-
ogy, 9,37,81; Hebrew, in rela-
rionto,96, 100, 101, 108,224;
Sanskrit, in relation to, 71, 75
Aramaic language, 9,37,81,96,100,
196,224
Archive for German National Educa-
tion, 169
Aretin, Johann Christoph von, 178
Aristotle, 46, 204
Armenia and Armenian language, 37,
65,73,91
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 4, 114
Aryan, as a term, 201-2, 213; lan-
guage, applied to, 111, 155,
209,213,233
"Aryan Myth," 198,221,289, 340n6
Aryans, views on, 17; F. Schlegel,
198,200, 201-2; and German
nationhood, 202, 204, 262, 284,
287; homeland, 202, 216,
219-21, 225; Lassen, 198,
203-4; Max Miiller, 214-18,
219,221,228; Renan, 224-28;
and Third Reich, 18,287; and
two-race theory of India, 202-3,
214-15,266
Aryans and Semites, 3, 110-12,219,
224, 225, 226, 228; as foils,
203-4,221; and history of rei i-
gion, 110, 191, 199,217-18,
227-28
Asia Po~yglotta (Klaproth), 84-87,
200
Asiatick Researches (Jones), 222
Association for the Advancement of
Sdence,Brirish,212,214
Assyrian language and Assyriology,
100-10 1, 221
Ast, Friedrich, 168-69, 171, 173
Aufkldrung. See Enlightenment
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 180,
229
Ausfuhrliche Arbeit von der teutschen
Haubt Sprache (Schottlius), 14
400
Austria, 15,98,120,121,132,
141-42,144,150,153,154
Austronesian languages, 59
autonomy of language, 4,12,19-21,
24,29,51-52,242-43,282,
294; criticized, 272, 276, 283;
origins and historical change, in
relation to, 11, 12,27,58,79,
116,288,289; and speakers,
199-200,228,232-33,236-39,
270,278; subjectivity, effect on,
5, 6, 25, 277,290, 293; and
thought, 30, 253, 257-58
Avestan language, 72, 73, 83, 105,
201,223
Azerbeijan, 65
Aztecs, 71
Bally, Charles, 272
Bambara language, 257
Bantu languages, 211, 235
Barthes, Roland, 291
Basel, 241, 259
Basque language, 23-24, 257
Bastian, Adolf, 210
Bavaria, 80, 131, 132, 142; involve-
ment in Greece, 180-82; and
neohumanism, 168, 178, 180-82
Bavarian dialect, 131-34, 142-44,
155
Bavarian Dictionary (Schmeller),
142-43,144
Bavarian Vernaculars (Schmeller),
132-34
Becker, Karl Ferdinand, 254
Belgium, 150
Benecke, Georg Friedrich, 118
Benfey, Theodor, 100, 104-8, 171,
220; on Indo- European and
Semitic languages, 105-8
Bengali language, 214
Berber languages, 107
Berlin Society for the German Lan-
guage,117
Berlin, University of, 7, 166; appoint-
ments to, 81,101,116,145-46,
 INDEX
157,172; students at, 153,246,
251,253,271
Bernal, Martin, 186, 187
Bernhardi, August Ferdinand, 49,53,
56,60,263
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche),
267,269
Bhagavad Gita, 77, 81
Bible Studies (Deissmann), 194
biblical criticism, 1, 3,6,9,35-37;
and historicization of language,
95-101,194-96,199; rational,
32-33,306
Biblio-Theological Lexicon of New Tes-
tament Greek (Cremer), 195
Biographies of Words and the Home of
the Aryas (Max Mtiller), 216,
217
Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 261-62
Bismarck, Otto von, 17, 153, 156,
249
Black Sea, 70, 220
Blok, Josine H., 185
Boas, Franz, 244
Bockh, Richard, 248-49
Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 116, 134
Boeckh, August, 7,162,171-78,
184, 186,259; Encyclopedia and
Methodology of the Philological
Sciences, 172-73, 175; and Her-
mann, 173-75; and language,
162,172,173-75,191,263
Bohlen, Peter von, 89
Bohm, Arnold, 43
Bonaparte, Jerome, 120
Bonn, University of, 80-81, 83, 84,
229
Bopp, Franz, 76-83, 123, 176,200,
222, 224; and A. W. Schlegel,
81,83; and Benfey, 107; on clas-
sification of languages, 82-83,
84; on comparative grammar,
79-83; and F. Schlegel, 79, 80;
on inflection, 79-81, 82-83;
influence of, 19,98,119,170,
188,276; and linguistics as a
401
field, 76,95, 152,224; On the
Conjugation System of Sanskrit,
77-79, 119,200; students of,
191,206,213
bourgeoisie, 7, 14, 15, 18, 137-40,
163,250
Breal, Michel, 176,235,270,272,
275-76
Breitinger, Johann Jakob, 116
Brinkmann, Hennig, 288
Britain, 16,35,72,88,198,212-13
Brosse, Charles de, 205
Brticke, Ernst, 155
Brugmann, Karl, 191,236-38,271,
273
Bryant, Jacob, 71
Bumann, Waltraud, 258
Bunsen, Christian Karl Josias von,
107,194,213-14
Burmese language, 93
Burnouf, Eugene, 218, 222-24
Btisching, Jchann Gustav, 117
Caspian Sea, 74, 202, 220
Catherine II, czarina of Russia, 68
Caucasian languages, 90
Caucasus Mountains, 65, 74, 87, 88,
89,90
Celtic language and Celts, 14, 148
central Asia, 66, 69, 84, 88, 93
Chaldean language, 37, 221
Chamberlain, Houston Stuart,
286-87
Champollion, Fran.;ois, 222
Chaudhuri, Nirad c., 215
Chezy, Antoine-Leonard de, 73, 77,
222
Chickering, Roger, 250
China, 71, 91, 92
Chinese language, 24, 89, 110,222,
254; Indo-European languages,
in relation to, 60, 75, 82, 104,
111,230,257; Sanskrit, in rela-
tion to, 93-94
Christianity, history of, 199, 201,
212,218,221,227-28
 INDEX
class distinctions and language, 135,
137--40
classical studies, 7, 62, 157,285,
286; and comparative philology,
105, 160-62, 170-71, 184, 187,
190-94, 196; Greek origins,
161,162,172; and language,
62, 160-62, 163-65, 170-72,
173-76,187,189; methodolo-
gies of, 172-76, 190; "realists"
and "verbalists," 162, 164,
173-75; veneration of Greek
language, 159, 160-61, 165,
168
classification of languages, 45, 60, 75,
82-83,230-31,256-57
Classification of Languages
(Steinthal),256-57
Colbrooke, H. T., 80
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52
Collection of Aramaic Idioms (Furst),
104
College de France, 100,221, 222,
223,254,270,276,293
Commentary on the Yanfa (Burnouf),
223
communication, language as, 27, 127,
176,277,284; and agency of
speakers, 11, 16,273; and com-
munity formation, 10,247,256;
disputed, 19, 115,236; episte-
mological considerations of, 24,
33,39,52,53,164,276
Comparative Grammar (Bopp), 3,
82-83,276
comparative-historical philology, 94,
208,258,259,263,270,276,
282, 285, 286; in Britain, 72,
198,212-13; and classical stud-
ies, 105, 160-62, 170-71, 184,
187-88, 189-94, 196; emer-
gence as a field, 69-70, 76, 79,
95, 160; in France, 198,221-24,
276; and German philology,
119, 152; and Saussure,
269-71
402
Compendium of the Comparative
Grammar of the Indogermanic
Languages (Schleicher), 230,
231,276
"Concerning the Faculty of Speech
and the Origin of Language"
(Fichte), 50-52
Condillac, Etienne Bonnet de, 21, 24,
30, 32, 38,41--42,43, 55; on
genius oflanguage, 29, 40; on
language and thought, 28-30;
on signs, 6, 28-30
conferences, annual: of classical
philologists and schoolmen, 153,
190-91; of Germanists, 147,
153
constructive theory oflanguage, 7,
20,38,54,63,259,282,294;
epistemological implications ot~
26,2~28,44, 57, 58;andhle-
alism, German, 25, 51
Coptic language, 104
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum,
174
Course on General Linguistics (Saus-
sure), 270, 272, 275, 277-80,
284,290
Cratylus (Plato), ~
Cremer, Hermann, 195
Creuzer, Friedrich, 77, 88, 177, 184,
186, 194
Critical and Historical Introduction
to the Canonical Scriptures
(Wette),97
criticism, textual and language stud-
ies, 2,118,121,230,231
Critique ofJudgment (Kant), 50, 164
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 46,
47; trans. Max Mi.iller, 216
Crusades of a Philologist (Hamann),
34
Culler, Jonathan, 272, 281
cuneiform, 100,223,271
Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old
Testament (Schrader), 100
Cuno, J. G., 220
 INDEX
Current State of Greece (Thiersch),
182
Curti us, Georg, 162, 171, 191-94,
241,259,271
Cushitic languages, 107. See also
Ethiopian languages
Czech language, IS
Danish languagc, IS, 114, 135,245
Darstellung der AltertumswissenschaJt
(Wolf), 159, 163-64
Darwin, Charles, 231, 233, 234,
301n43
de Gaulle, Charles, 291
Deissmann, Gustav Adolf, 194-95
Delitzsch, Friedrich, 100-10 1, 220
Denmark, 150
Descartes, Rene, 205
descent, ethnic, 10, IS, 17, ll5,
289
Deutsches Volksthum (Jahn), 117
Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, 206
diachronic linguistics. See linguistics:
diachronic
dialects and dialectology, 102, ll5,
128,131-36,149-50,154,237
Diary of a Christian (Hamann), 37
Dietrich, Franz, 152
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 244, 247
Discourse on Methods (Descartes), 205
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
(Rousseau), 42
discursive community, 8, 10, 11, 127,
281,289; and German scholars,
136-37,243,244,247,248
Dissen, Ludolph Georg, 105, 206
Dissertation on the Influence ofOpin-
ions on Language (Michaelis),
32-33,34,41
Dodart, Denis, 205
Dorn, Bernhard, 73, 88, 90-91
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 173
Dutch language, 127,128,135,150,
231
East India Company, 89, 346n128
403
Eastern Origins of the Celtic Nations
(Prichard), 212
Ecole des langues orientales vivantes,
254
Edda, ll4
Egypt and Egyptian languages, 71,
179,184,185,189,191,194,
214,257
Elements of Comparative Philology
(Latham),219
Encyclopedia and Methodology of the
Philological Sciences (Boeckh),
172-73,175
Encyclopedia of Philology (Madvig),
176
English language, 40, 127, 135
Enlightenment, 6, 21, 25, 63, 120,
130, 162, 178,212;and~n­
guage theory, 50,61, ll8, 137,
174; reception in Germany, 30,
34,40
Epicuflls of Samos, 204
Erasmus, Desiderius, 9
Ernst August I, king of Hanover, 98,
146
Erthal, Friedrich Karl von, 77
Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing (Locke), 26-28
Essay on Pdli (Burnouf), 222
Essay on the Inequality of the Human
Races (Gobineau), 197-98
Essay on the Language and Wisdom of
the Indians (F. Schlegel), 73-76,
222
Essay on the Origin of Human Under-
standing (Condillac), 28-29·
Essay on the Origin of Language
(Herder),41-42
Ethiopian languages, 9, 100
ethnic descent. See descent, ethnic
ethnology and ethnography, 45,
66-68,205,212,214-16,224;
and language as method, 43, 45;
Mosaic, 67-71
Etymological Studies of Indo-Germanic
Languages (Pon), 208
 INDEX
etymology, 15,45,143,187,265;
and the historicization of lan-
guage, 126, 192; and meaning of
words, 8, 101,265--66; specula-
tive, 69, 122,202
Europe)s Languages in Systematic
Overview (Schleicher), 232
Ewald, Friedrich Heinrich, 88, 95,
98-99,103-4,105,108,211,
223,229
exegesis. See biblical criticism
expressive theory oflanguage, 20-21,
63,103,281
Fairy Tales (Grimm), 120, 137
Fallersleben, Heinrich Hoffmann von,
117,146
family tree (Stammbaum), 10,231
Farsi language, 24, 90, 194, 221,
229,275; German, in relation to,
65, 70-71; Sanskrit, in relation
to, 74, 105,223
Feuerbach, Anselm, 178
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 18, 50-53,
55, 168,250,254; "Concerning
the Faculty of Speech and the
Origin of Language," 50-51;
German nationhood, 113; lan-
guage as idea, 51-52, 54, 62
Finnish language, 231, 257
Flemish language, 150
folklore and folklife, 120, 143
Formigari, Lia, 20, 50
Foster, Georg, 72
Foucault, Michel,S, 20, 242, 290,
292-94; on comparative philol-
ogy, 18-19, 303; on death of
man, 19,292,295; on language,
19; and Nietzsche, 19,265,293;
Order of Things) 18-19,265,
292-93, 294; and poststructural-
ism, 282, 293
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(Chamberlain), 286-87
Fragments on Recent German Litera-
ture (Herder), 33, 40, 45
404
Frahn, Christian Martin, 88, 90
France, 10, 16,88,198,221-24,
276,290-94
Franconian dialects, 132
Franco- Prussian War, 156, 275
Frank, Othmar, 72, 76, 89
Frankfurt Parliament, 140, 147, 150,
245
Franz Joseph I, emperor of Austria-
Hungary, 153
frederick II, king of Prussia, 25,
30-31,34,40
French language, 15, 31,34,309
Freud, Sigmund, 244
Freyer, Hieronymus, 14
Freytag, Gustav, 18
FriedensSieg (Schottelius), 13
Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of Prussia,
84,97,113,245
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, king of Prussia,
141,146,150
Frisian language, 123, 149,249
Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft) 14
Fuhrmann, Manfred, 165
Fundgraben des Orients) 84
Furst, Julius, 95, 104, 108, 223
Future of Science (Renan), 1
Gardt, Andreas,S
Geiger, Lazarus, 220
genealogy, 262, 274, 279, 293; as
historical practice, 11,243,259,
265-66,269,282; languages, as
applied to, 10,45,70,79,192,
200,230,231; national, 11, 12,
67,206,289
Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche),
265-67
General History and Comparative Sys-
tem of the Semitic Languages
(Renan), 224, 226
General History of the North
(Schlozer),68
Gene~s, 10, 12,21,66,67
Geneva, 271, 275,277, 284
Georgia, 65, 73
 INDEX
Gerber, Gustav, 60, 263
German Confederation, 15, 128, 141,
147
German Dictionary (Grimm),
139-40, 144, 146, 147
German Empire, 4,17,18,157,
249-51
German Grammar (Grimm), 119,
122-26, 128, 135, 147, 148
German language, Middle High, 116,
11~, 122, 123, 152
German language, New High, 14, 15,
68; dialects, in relation to, 102,
136, 141; Farsi, in relation to,
70, 74, 90; historicized, 123,
125-26, 139; nationality, as
marker of~ 103, 114-15, 155,
245
German language, Old, 117, 120,
122, 152; Germanic languages,
within, 123, 154, 156; histori-
cized, 124-25, 134-35, 138,
155
German Language Association, 250
German Legal Antiquities (Grimm),
126
German Mythology (Grimm), 144,
146
German philology, 190; and compara-
tive philology, 119, 152-53;
institutionalization of~ 115,
116-19,137,140,152-53,157;
and nationalism, 115, 137, 141,
145-46, 147, 153-54, 156-57
Germanic sound shifts, 124-26, 148,
154, 155,210,237
Germanic tribes, 74, 84, 87, 120,
135, 144, 149, 189,285
Germanics. See German philology
Gerratana, Federico, 259
Gesenius, Wilhelm, 83, 96-97, 98,
100, 104, 108,223
Gobineau, Arthur Comte de, 197-98,
204,210-11
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 72
G6rres, Joseph von, 77, 117, 186
405
Gospel History Critically and Philo-
sophically Treated (Weisse), 99
Gospel ofJohn, 10,21
Gothic language, 118, 125, 126, 141,
152; Germanic languages,
within, 122, 123, 145, 149
Goths, 70, 87, 141, 148, 149, 189
G6ttingen, University ot~ 61, 118,
145; appointments to, 35, 121,
184; students at, 96, 105, 178,
206
G6ttingen Seven, 98, 146, 147
Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 118
Grafton, Anthony, 7
grammar, 14,71,171,175,226-27,
268; comparative, 54, 75, 76-83,
152, 191,235,283; general, 16,
21,56,134,164,168,176; his-
torical, 114, 118, 119-27, 134,
222,274; philosophical, 53, ll8,
161, 164-65,222; universal or
rational, 50, 53, 56, 164, 172,
192, 195
Grammar, Logic, and Psychology
(Steinthal),254-55
Grammar of the Icelandic or Old
Norse Tongue (Rask), 122
Greece, 24,149; and Bavarian House
ofWitteisbach, 181-82; German
national identification with
ancient, 165-69, 171, 181, 189,
190; origins of, 177-79, 182,
184-87; War ofIndependence,
143, 162, 177, 180-81
Greek language, 83, 105, 170, 223;
Attic dialect, 171, 188, 194,
335n54; German, as related to,
161, 168-69, 187; as ideal lan-
guage, 17,62,119, 160, 161,
164-65, 168-69, 184, 188, 196;
Indo-European languages,
within, 71, 74,184,187-89,
191,194; New Testament
(Koine), 3,101, 171,194-96;
philology, centrality to, 61, 62,
80, 140, 157
 INDEX
Greek Mythology (Welcker), 191
GreB, Franz, 155
Grimm, Jacob, 3, 89, 94, 142, 176,
188,216,225,284,289; and
constructive theory of language,
7,126,150; dialects, 128,
135-36; gendering of language,
138--40; German Grammar, 119,
122-26,128,135,147,148;
Germanic sound shifts, 124-26;
historical grammar, 114, 119-27,
133; History of the German Lan-
guage, 147-50,216; influence,
18,19,95,152,153,170,213,
224, 263, 295; north German
linguistic nationhood, 144--45;
origin of German nation, 124,
126,151,187; and Pan-German-
ism, 146, 149-50; political views
of, 117, 119-20, 121, 130,
135-36,144,146-51; and vowel
modifications, 122, 123-24
Grimm, Wilhelm, 89,117,120,145
Grimm's Law. See Germanic sound
shifts
Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob
Christoph von, 14
Grossman, Jeffrey, 57
Gueintz, Christian, 14
Gutenberg, Johannes, 146
gymnasium as institution, 137, 140,
152,157
Habermas, Jurgen, 6
Haeckel, Ernst, 233
Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der,
116-17
Halle, University of, 53, 62, 96, 145,
159,162,206
Hallesche Jahrbiicher, 206
Ham, 67, 71,235
Hamann, Johann Georg, 34-39, 61,
72; on autonomy of language,
25,37,294-95; and Herder, 40,
42,47,48; and Kant, 47--48; on
language and thought, 6, 34,
406
38-39,46--48,58,243,258,
260,263,300n28;and
Michaelis, 30, 33, 34-35, 35-37,
39
Hambach Festival, 105, 128
Hamburg, 141,235
Hamilton, Alexander, 73, 77, 222
Hamitic Hypothesis, 235
Handbook of Hebraic Antiquities
(Kalthoff), 11 0
Hannover, 98, 146,206
Hardenburg, Karl von, 166
Hartmann, Eduard von, 260
Hauser, Christopher, 180
Hebrew Grammar (Ewald), 103--4
Hebrew Grammar (Gesenius), 96,
104
Hebrew language, 8, 61, 70,103;
and biblical criticism, 9, 35-37,
95-101; historicized, 37,
95-101,195;andRenan,2,
217,221,223,224,225-27;
Sanskrit, in relation to, 59, 75,
109,212; studied, 24, 81,105,
187,222,229; Ursprache, as, 14,
83, 161
Hebrew Language (Delitzsch),
100-101
Hebrew-German Dictionary (Gese-
nius),96
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 48,
194,230,253
Heimdall: Journal for Pure German-
dom and Pan-Germandon, 250
Heine, Heinrich, 81
Hengstenberg, Ernst von, 97
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 60, 238,
246,253,255-56
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 3, 6, 21,
40--45,69,72,73,284;on
autonomy of language, 25-26,
58, 294-95; Essay on the Origin
of Language, 41--42; and
Hamann, 40, 42, 47, 48; on lan-
guage and nationhood, 40--41,
44--45, 56, 113, 114; on lan-
 INDEX
guage and study of culture, 43,
45, 163; on language and
thought, 40--41, 44--45, 46,
48--49,243,258,260,263;
Metakritik, 47,53,61; and
Michaelis, 30, 33, 34, 40--41;
nationalism, as associated with,
17,286,289; and philology as
discipline, 61-62, 224
Hermann, Gottfried, 164-65, 170,
171,177,178,213; on lan-
guage, 174-75, 187-88, 192,
195
hermeneutics, 6, 7
Herodotus, 177, 179, 186
Hess, Jonathan, 33
Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 7, 24, 61,
81, 159, 162, 166
Heyse, Carl Wilhelm Ludwig, 253
Himalayan Mountains, 87, 93
historicism, 7, 12, 20, 235, 239, 285,
286, 287; in classical studies,
171-73; crisis of linguistic,
238-39,241--42,269-70,272
historicization of language, 10, 20,
28, 63, 77, 277; and autonomy
oflanguage, 6,19,21,44,58;
and biblical criticism, 3,9,67,
194-96; German, 114-27,
132-35; Hebrew, 95-101,195;
New Testament Greek, 3,
194-96
History and Antiquities of the Doric
Race (Miiller), 186-87
History of the Fall of the Free Greek
States (Humboldt), 167-68
History of the German Language
(Grimm), 147-50,216
History of the Goths (Jordanes), 114
History ofGreck Literature (K.O.
Miiller), 188-89
History of the Hebrew Language
(Gesenius), 96
History of Israel (Ewald), 98
Hittite language, 271
Hobbes, Thomas, 8
407
Hobsbawn, Eric J., 249
Hoefer, Albert, 152-53
Holstein, 147
Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius, 99
Holy Roman Empire, 3, 15, 120,
132, 167
humanism, 2, 7, 8, 9, 14,291-92
humanities, language as methodology
in,4,6,7,270,281-82,290
Humboldt, Alexander von, 24
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 54-61, 92,
176,198,206,284,289;on
autonomy of language, 54-55;
on classification of languages,
59-60, 94, 230; and comparative
philology, 23-24, 61, 62, 63, 77,
80,81,224; on Greek language
and neohumanism, 166-68,
169-70, 178; on language and
nationality, 56-59; on language
and thought, 6, 21, 54, 55,
56-59,263; on Semitic and
Indo-European languages, 109;
and Steinthal, 243, 251-53
Hume, David, 37
Hundt, Markus, 13
Hungarian language, 68
Hungary, 142
Hutton, Christopher, 288, 304n14
Iceland and Icelandic language, 68,
122, 145
idealism, German, 25, 46, 50-53, 54,
60,204,254
Ideas on the Philosophical History of
Mankind (Herder), 44, 45, 48
imperialism, 66, 180, 181, 184,
200-201,346nI27
Incas, 71
India, 88, 92,119,160,201,214,
219; as German homeland,
74-76, 84, 87; Romantic long-
ing for, 72-73, 276; two-race
theory of, 202-3, 213-15, 266
Indian Antiquities (Lassen), 203, 227
Indische Bibliothek, 202
 INDEX

Indo- European homeland, 83-84, 83,222

208, 286, 317n94. See also Jordanes, 114, 144
Urheimat Joseph, John E., 272
Indo- European languages, IO, 90, Journal Asiatique, 84
94,123,127,268,271; classifi- Junius, Franciscus, 118
cation of, 88, 93,119,257; Justi, Ferdinand, 152
Greek within, 184, 187-89, 192,
194; invention ot~ 65, 66, Kabala, 8, 37, 304n14
70-71, 91; Semitic languages, in Kalmyk language, 92
relation to, 17,71,83,95-96, Kalthoff, Johann Heinrich, 110-11
102-12,209, 220,225; ttrms Kamchatka, 68
tor, 59,200-202 Kanne, Johann Arnold, 168
Indo-Germanic languages. See Indo- Kant, Immanuel, 25, 46-50, 60, 234;
European languages linguistic critique of, 52, 53, 55,
Indo-Germans, invention of, 65, 84, 260,263
87 Kapodistiras, Ioannis, 180, 181
Indology, 3, 71-72, 76, 77, 81, 83, Karlsbad Decrees, 137
229,286,287 Kashmir, 69, 73, 224
Inequality of the Human Races (Pott), Kassel, 119, 139
198,210-11 Kaulen, Franz, 206
inflection, 94, 210; and Hebrew, 108, Kawi language, 24, 59
109; and Sanskrit, 75, 79-81, Kazakhstan, 89
226; and tripartite division of Kemble, John Mitchell, 213
languages, 59-60, 82-83, 230, Klaproth, Julius, 65-66, 83-87, 93,
257 221,223, 318nl09; Asia Poly-
instincts and instinctive life, 192, 243, glotta, 84-87,200; on "Indo-
251,254,258,259,263,267 Germanic," 65-66, 87,200; on
Iran, 69, 72, 73, 201. See also Persian origin of German nation, 65-66,
Empire 87,91; and Russian Empire, 89
Ireland, 209 Klenze, Leo von, 181
Irmscher, Johannes, 180 Knobloch, Clemens, 286
Koerner, E. F. Konrad, 21,108,273,
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 47,55, 275
178 Koine Greek. See Greek language:
Jacobs, Friedrich, 168 New Testament (Koine)
Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 117 KOinische Zeitung, 229
Jakobson, Roman, 286, 290 Konigsberg, 35,40,46, 113
Japan and Japanese language, 71, 93, Korean language, 93
318n117 Kossinna, Gustav, 221
Japheth, 12,67 Kotzebue, August von, 97
Jardine, Lisa, 7 Kretschmer, Paul, 232
Java, 71 KrUger, Karl Wilhelm, 170
Jay, Martin, 5, 6, 300n28 Kuhn, Adalbert, 216
Jena, University of 48, 50, 145, 164, Kulturkampf, 249
229,233 Kuiturnation, 251
Jones, William, 46,70-71,72,73, Kyrgyzstan, 89

408
 INDEX
Lacan, Jacques, 291
Lachmann, Karl, 118, 130, 191,230
Lagarde, Paul Anton de, 209
Langles, Louis-Mathieu, 77
language: autonomy of (see autonomy
oflanguage); and biblical criti-
cism (see biblical criticism); and
the body, 151, 204-6, 208,
209-10,228-29,236-38,256;
classification of (see classification
oflanguages); gendering of,
138--40; historicization of (see
historicization oflanguage); ori-
gin of (see origin of language);
and race (see race and language);
standardization of (see standard-
ization of language); trans-
parency of (see transparency of
language)
language and nationhood, 4-5, 12,
25, 34, 249-50, 256-57; in
comparative philology, 23-25,
66,69-70,109,187,188-89;
discursive relationship, as a, 245,
247--48, 249; in German philol-
ogy, 113-16, 151; Hamann,
Herder, Humboldt on, 23-25,
38--41,44--45,56-59
language and thought, 23-25, 55--60,
243, 258-60, 263-69; among
Kantians, 46-53, 216-17; sign
systems, in relation to, 26-30,
31-34,280,292
Language as Art (Gerber), 263
langue, 258, 274, 277-78
Lassen, Christian, 83, 191,214,220;
on Aryans and Semites, 198,
203--4; and Burnouf, 222; and
Renan,203,227,347nI68;on
two-race theory of India, 203
Latham, Robert, 219
Latin language, 104-5, 160,223,
275; antiquity, in study of, 145,
155, 164; German, as distant
from, 113,161,168; Indo-Euro-
pean languages, within, 71, 74,
409
125, 191; philology, centrality to,
45,61,62,140,157; prestige of,
14,81,118,134,160
"Latium and Hellas: Observations on
classical Antiquity" (Humboldt),
166-67, 169-70
Law Rook of Manu, 72
Lazarus, Moritz, 60, 243, 244--48,
253,256,263,275
Le Hir, Arthur-Marie, 223
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
(Hegel), 230
Lectures on Universal History (F.
Schlegel), 75
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 14,
67-68, 304nnl0-11; on lan-
guage and thought, 26-27, 29
Leipzig, University of, 14, 147,236;
appointments to, 164, 191; stu-
dents at, 178, 241, 259, 270,
271
Leskien, August, 271, 273
Letter to Chevalier Bunsen on the Clas-
sification of the Turanian Lan-
guages (Max Miiller), 215
Leventhal, Robert S., 61
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 242, 270, 282,
290,291-92
lexicography and lexica, 14,45,
69-70, 71, 143--44
liberalism, 146, 153, 157, 177,211,
244,249,289; and philology,
153,206,211,229,250,251
liberal nationalism and philology, 105,
115, 120, 163, 184
Life and Growth of Language (Whit-
ney),273
Life ofJesus (Renan), 221
Light from the Orient (Frank), 72
linguistic agency. See agency, linguistic
linguistic determinism, 5, 21, 199,
211,212,228,268,281
linguistic nationalism, 4,5, 15, 18,
24, 128, 130, 142--45, 299. See
also language and nationhood
linguistic relativity, 21, 28, 54
 INDEX
linguistics, 10, 236-39; and classical
philology, 176; critique of Ger-
man, 272-76, 283; diachronic,
274,279; general, 192,239,
277, 283, 287; and German
philology, 3, 152, 156,277;
instutionalization of, 156, 157,
197,199,206,229,277-78,
287; national philologies, in rela-
tion to, 67, 76,152-53,156,
200,206,229,287; as a natural
science, 154,228,233-34,259;
synchronic, 239, 243, 269, 270,
272,274,279,285,287; turn to
structuralism in, 236, 239,
269-81,283-84
"linguistic turn," 5,12,19,47,282,
300n28
Link, Heinrich Friedrich, 73
Lithuania and Lithuanian language,
219,229,275
Lobeck, Christian August, 170, 177
Locke, John, 16,29, 33, 57,279; on
language and thought, 8, 26-28,
304nn9, 13, 15, 17
London,2,35, 80, 90, 170,229
London Times, 100
Luden, Heinrich, 114
Ludwig I, king of Bavaria, 80, 143,
146,178,181
Luther, Martin, 13, 139, 141, 144
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 72
Madvig, Johann Nicolai, 176
Mahabharata, 77, 80
Maimon, Solomon, 47, 49
Majer, Friedrich, 72
Maltese language, 96
Manchester, Martin, 60
Mann, Thomas, 244
Marchand, Suzanne L., 101,285
Markley, Robert, 8
MaBmann, Hans Ferdinand, 117,
137, 143
Maupertuis, Piern:-Loub Moreau de,
30,31,41
410
Max Muller, Friedrich, 72, 211-18,
223, 233-34,272,297n9,
319n125; on Aryans and
Semites, 198,214-18,219,221,
228; on language and religion,
217-18; on language and
thought, 216-17, 280; on philol-
ogy and ethnology, 212, 214-16;
on polytheism, original, 218; on
race and language, 214-16, 224;
and Renan,217,218,228;on
Turanian languages, 213; on
two-race theory ofIndia, 214
Maxmillian I, king of Bavaria, 178,
181
meaning and language, 8,11,21,33,
277,278,281,282
Meillet, Antoine, 176,283,290
Meinecke, Friedrich, 251
Meinhof, Carl, 235
Memoir on the Primitive System of
Vowels in the Indo-European Lan-
guages (Saussure), 271-72
Mende languages, 257
Mende- Negro Languages (Steinthal),
257
Metacritique of the Critique of Pure
Reason (Herder), 48
Metakritik, 47-49,52,260,263
Metternich, Klemens von, 15, 73,
141,142,180
Michaelis, Johann David, 30-33, 206,
305n40; and Hamann, 30, 33,
34-36, 39; and Herder, 30, 33,
34,40-41
Michelis, Enrico de, 221
Mithridates (Adelung), 222
Mohl, Julius, 221
Mongolia and Mongolian language,
89,91,92,257,318nl11
monogenesis, 67, 83, 95,104,111
monotheism, 2,199,218,221,
227-28,244,254
Mosse, George, 17, 359n25
mother tongue, 10; in domestic con-
texts, 139-40; as indicative of
 INDEX
nationality, 13,43,44,248-49,
288-89
MuUenhoff, Karl, 153
Muller, Friedrich, 210
Muller, Karl Otfried, 98, 105, 162,
177,184-89,191,196,206;
and comparative philology, 184,
187-88; on Greek origins, 177,
184, 185-87; History and Antiq-
uities of the Doric Race, 186-87;
History of Greek Literature,
188-89; on language and nation-
ality, 186, 188-89
Munich, 89,130,142,146
music and language, 261-62
Myanmar, 71
mythology, 72, 77, 120-21, 145,
227,244; comparative, 73, 74,
2]7-]8
Nala and Damayanti, 80
Napoleon, 3, 113, 131, 178,222
nationalism, German, 3-4, 16, 34,
114, 137-38, 153, 163,286;
and German philology, 115, 137,
140-41, 145-46, 147, 153-54,
156-57; and language, 4, 13,
116-17,131-32,140-41,147,
249-51; and origins, 11,
113-16,126,251; political man-
ifestations of, 73, 117, 128, 146;
vii/kisch, 17,245,249-51,284,
289
national origins, German. See origins,
German national
National Socialism, 287,288,290
Native American languages, 24, 75,
211,257
Nazi Germany. See Third Reich
Neogrammarians (Neugrammatiker),
156, 236-39,251, 273, 286;cri-
tique of, 192,277, 288; explana-
tions for linguistic change,
236-38; and historicism, crisis of
linguistic, 200, 238-39, 270; and
psychology in linguistics, 236,
411
238-39,280; and Saussure, 241,
242,270,271,277; on speakers,
236-39; Volksgeist, disregard for,
236,238
neohumanism, 17, 117, 155, 162,
165-70, 178, 180-82, 190
neo-Romanticism,285
Neumann, Friedrich, 93-94
New Testament Greek. See Greek lan-
guage: New Testament (Koine)
N ibelungenlied, 116-18, 153
Niehbuhr, Barthold Georg, 98, 173
Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel,
168, 178
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 7, 11,21,
193,258-69,281-82; Birth of
Tragedy, 261-62; and compara-
tive philology, 258-59; and Fou-
cault, 19,265,293; and geneal-
ogy, 265-66, 269; Genealogy of
Morals, 265-67; on language and
subjectivity, 261, 266-69; on
language and thought, 259, 260,
263-69; on language and the
unconscious, 251, 260,261,
269; legacy, 284, 287, 289, 290,
295; on music and language,
261-62; "On Truth and Lying,"
263-65; on origin oflanguage,
260, 263; on representation and
language, 261, 262, 264; and
Saussure, 241-42, 270, 281-82;
and Steinthal, 258, 259, 260,
263
Nordic languages, 122, 123, 145,
149, 155
Norse, Old, language, 117
Novalis, 52, 120
occupation, Napoleonic, 114, 119,
165, 178
Old Testament, 8, 9, 21,33,95-101,
194-96. See also biblical criticism
Olender, Maurice, 3, 101, 110, 199,
228
On Dogmatics (Rothe), 194
 INDEX
"On Music and Words" (Nietzsche),
261
On the Comparative History of Lan-
guage (Schleicher), 230
On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit
(Bopp), 77-80,119,200
On the Diversity of Human Language
Constrttction (Humboldt), 57,
58-59, 109
On the Egyptian)s Relationship to the
Semitic Language Family (Ben-
fey), 107
On the History of Ancient Art (Winck-
elmann), 165, 179
On the History of the German Lan-
guage (Scherer), 152, 154-56,
237
On the Language and Wisdom of the
Indians (F. Schlegel), 73-75
On the Month Names of Some Ancient
Peoples (Benfey), 105
"On the Origin of Language" (Nietz-
sche), 260, 267
On the Origin of Language (Renan),
223,225
"On the Origin of the Hindous" (A.
W. Schlegel), 202
On the Periodization of the Fine Arts
among the Greeks (Thiersch),
178-79
On the Persian Language (Frank), 72
"On the Presumed Egyptian Origin
of Greek Art" (Thiersch), 185
On the Spirit of Antiquity and Its
Meaningfor Our Age (Ast),
168-69
"On Truth and Lying" (Nietzsche),
263-65
"On Writing and Its Instruction"
(SchmelIer), 131
Oppert, Julius, 100
Order of Things (Foucault), 18-19,
265,292-93,294
organic metaphors in linguistics, 12,
43-44,79-80,123,208,270,
287,294; and autonomy oflan-
412
guage, 232, 235; Indo-European
languages, applied to, 59, 75, 82;
and nationhood, 40-41, 63, 154;
reactions against, 242, 272, 277,
281
organs, linguistic, 151,204-5,234;
and language change, 155,229,
233,238,275
Oriental Renaissance, 190
Oriental studies, 4, 80; classical stud-
ies, in relation to, 160, 182, 190,
191; institutionalization of, 94,
319n125; and Russian Empire
88-92, 317nl02
Orientalism, 66,110,111,177,180,
182, 312n4, 322n196
origin, myths of. See origins, German
national
origin oflanguage, 41-43, 45,51,
54,151,243,253-54,260,263
Origin afthe Species (Darwin), 231,
233
origin paradigm, 10-12,242,243,
244,251,259,280,285,290;
conflicting implications of,
10-12,289; critique of, 265-66,
269-70; in twentieth-century
German linguistics, 285, 286,
288
origins, German concern for, 10-12
origins, German national, 155-56,
168, 189,243,262; conflicting
models of, 4,16,18,112, 114;
F. Schlegel on, 74-76, 84, 87,
228; Germanic model of, 124,
126, 151; Klaproth on, 65-66,
87,91; Orientalist model of,
65-67, III
Origins of the Indo-Europeans (Pictet),
209,271
Ossetian language, 65, 91
Osthoff, Hermann, 191,236-38,271
Otto I, king of Greece, 181, 182
Ottoman Empire, 66, 89, 177,
179-80,181,182
Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal
 INDEX
History (Bunsen), 214
Pahlavi language, 222
pan-Germanism, 18, 146, 149-50,
250
Pantschatantra (Benfey), 105-7
Paris, 77,81,84,94,100,229,254,
275,290
Paris, Gaston, 275
Park, Peter K. J., 80
parole, 258, 274-75, 277
Pashto language, 90
Passow, Friedrich, 168, 169
Paul, Hermann, 156,236,237-39,
243, 244, 270; and critique of
German linguistics, 272, 274-75
Penka, Karl, 210
Pentateuch, 10, 16,71,96,97,98
Perconti, Pietro, 49
Persian Empire, 89, 107, 185. See also
Iran
Persian language. See Farsi language
Peter I, czar of Russia, 68
Pfeiffer, Franz, 153
Pfister-Schwaighusen, Hermann von,
250
philology, 1-3,4,7, 14,21; biblical,
9,32-33 (see also biblical criti-
cism); classical, 61-62 (see also
classical studies); comparative-
historical (see comparative-histori-
cal philology); emergence as a
discipline, 17,45-46,61-63,89,
115-19,137,140,152-53,157;
and ethnology, 45, 212, 214-16,
224; German (see German philol-
ogy); linguistics, as distinct from,
67,76,152-53,156,200,206,
229,287; and nationhood,
13-14, 16, 18 (see also language
and nationhood); and origins,
11, 12, 16 (see also origin
paradigm); Semitic (see Semitic
languages); and theology, 3, 9,
11,61,67,103-4,229,259
Philology, History, and Psychology
413
(Steinthal), 259
Philosophy of Art (Schelling), 51
Philosophy of the Unconscious (Hart-
mann), 260
physiology, 205, 208, 209-10, 280;
sound shifts, as explanation for,
155,156,229,233-34,236-38
Pictet, Adolphe, 209, 216, 220, 223,
271
Pietism, 21,35-38,40, 194
Plato, 8, 12, 46
Poliakov, Leon, 17, 340n6
Polish language, 15,245,249
polygenesis, 75, 87, 96, 108
polytheism, 218, 244
poststructuralism, 5,6, 19,21,242,
282,290,293
Potocki, Jan, 89
Pott, August Friedrich, 83, 88, 176,
200-201, 204-11, 220; and
Gobineau, 197-98,210-11; and
linguistics as discipline, 108, 160,
206; and physiology, 208, 210;
on race and language, 197-98,
210-11
Prague, 191,229,284,285,286
Prichard, James Cowles, 212
Principles of General Grammar
(Sacy), 222
Principles of the General Linguistic
Type (Humboldt), 56, 57
Principles of Greek Etymology (Cur-
tius),241
Principles of the History of Language
(Paul), 239, 270, 274
Prolegomena ad Homerum (Wolf),
118
Proto-Germanic language, 125, 149,
154, 155, 156, 325n44
Proto-Indo-European language, 71,
125, 220,225, 230, 298n13;
research on, 107,231,237,242,
271
Prussia, 24, 31, 35,135,146,245;
language policies of, 245, 249;
and nationalist movement, 115,
 INDEX
Prussia (continued)
137, 141, 146, 150, 153, 157;
and philology as discipline, in
relation to, 76,130,166,178;
and unification, German, 15, 18,
105,141,149,150-51,153,
154
Prussia's Moral Privileges in Germany
(Lazarus), 246
psychology, 4, 20, 242--43, 246; and
linguistics, 21, 155-56, 236,
238-39,244,251-58,274-75,
280
Pugach, Sara, 235
Pyrenees, 23, 149
Quatremere, Etienne Marc, 223
Quinet, Edgar, 190
race: and Aryans and Semites, 202--4,
214-16,219-21,224-25,228;
and religion, 199,201,221
race and language, 4, 112, 155,
197-200,288; correlated, 17,
18,91,197-98,234-35,250,
269,286; distinguished, 57, 198,
205-6,210-11,281
Ramayana, 77, 81
Rask, Christian Rasmus, 119, 122,
123,213
Raumer, Rudolfvon, 152, 153
referentiality of language, 12, 20,
29-30,251,262,270,278-79,
282,292
Reflections on the Origin of Languages
(Maupertuis),31
Reformation, 6, 73, 144
Reinecke, Adolf, 250
Reinhold, Karl Leonard, 49-50, 164
Remusat, Abel, 94, 222
Renaissance, 8, 9, 12
Renan, Ernest, 6, 11,223-28,253,
254; on Aryans and Semites,
198-99,212,220,221,224-25,
226-28; on German philology,
1-3, 283; on Hebrew and
414
Semitic languages, 2, 221, 223,
224,225-27; and linguistic
determinism, 228, 280; and Max
Muller, 217, 218, 228; on
monotheism, original, 227-28;
on origins of Christianity,
227-28; on race and language,
224-25,228
representation, 8, 12,42, 46, 277,
293; and Kantian philosophy, 49,
50, 53, 55, 56; Nietzsche on,
261,262,264; transparency of,
6,19,26-27
Researches into the Physical History of
Man (Prichard), 212
Restoration, 4, 109, 137, 140, 157
Results of Comparative Philology in
Reference to Classical Scholarship
(Curtius),192
revelation, divine, 6, 73, 76, 201
Revolutions of 1848--49, 146, 147,
150,229
Rheinisches Museum, 175
Rhode, J. G., 201
Riegel, Hermann, 250
Rig Veda, 201, 213, 214, 223
Ritschl, Friedrich Wilhelm, 190, 191,
229,230,231,241,259
Romance languages, 45, 113, 156,
169,287
Romanticism and German Romantics,
13,24,56,88,130,131,144,
168; and India, 72-73,276; and
language, 46, 49,50-54,60,
304
Romany language, 209, 342n55
roots (in language), 107-8, 154,217;
Hebrew, 103-7,225-27; and
language comparison, 75, 84, 95
Rosen, Friedrich August, 213
Roth, Georg Michael, 49-50
Rothe, Richard, 194
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42, 308n85
Ruckert, Friedrich, 76, 87, 89, 209,
213
Ruge, Arnold, 206
 INDEX
runes, 141, 145,250
Russian Empire, 15,68,119; and
German Orientalists, 66, 88-92,
317; and imperial expansion, 66,
89, 184
Sachphilologen. See classical studies:
"realists" and "verbalists"
Sachsen-Meiningen, Georg von, 229
Sacy, Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de, 77,
222
Said, Edward, 17, 66
Sakuntala, 72
Sama Veda, 105
Samaritan language, 96, 100
Sanskrit Grammar (Whitney), 272
Sanskrit language, 13,52, 59, 70, 72,
92,169,188,217,219;and
comparative-historical philology,
119, 148, 152, 160,229;
Hebrew, in relation to, 75, 109,
212; Indo-European languages,
within, 46, 71, 77, 79-82, 87,
111,122,125,152,222-23;
studied,24, 105, 170, 187,221,
229,271,276; Ursprache, as, 83,
201
Sapir, Edward, 54
Sartre, Jean Paul, 291-92
Sauer, August, 285
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 21, 176, 191,
239,258,269-75,277-82;
autonomy of language, implica-
tions for, 280; and German lin-
guistic tradition, 3, 7, 269-72;
on language and thought, 280;
legacy, 284-85, 287, 289,
290-91; and Nietzsche, 241-42,
270,281-82; on referentiality of
signs, 278-79; on subjectivity,
280-81
Savage Mind (Levi-Strauss), 291-92
Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 120
Saxon languages, 122, 123,249
Saxony, 135, 145
Scandinavia, 74, 87,114,119,128,
415
141,145,150
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph,
51,77,168
Scherer, Josef, 132
Scherer, Wilhelm, 152, 153-57; and
Neogrammarians, 156, 237
Schiller, Friedrich, 72, 146, 159
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 54, 58,81,
108,110,121,122,191; and
Bopp, 81, 83; and comparative
grammar, 54, 83; on rwo-race
theory of India, 202
Schlegel, Friedrich, 19,73-76,77,
119,120-21,159-60,184; on
Aryans and Semites, 198,200,
201-2; and Bopp, 79,80;on
classification of languages, 94,
103, 108-9, 122; Essay on the
Language and Wisdom of the
Indians, 73-76, 222; on India,
73-76; on inflection, 59, 75; on
origin of German nation, 74-76,
84,87,228
Schleicher, August, 105, 191,209,
220,228-35,237,272, 276; on
autonomy oflanguage, 229,
232-33, 235, 242; disregard for
speaker, 232-34, 235; on family
tree model, 231; and Hegelian
philosophy, 230; on history of
language, 230-31; and linguistics
as a discipline, 199,229,230,
244; and materialism, 234
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 48, 114,
194,300n28
Schleswig, 147,245
SchlOzer, August Ludwig von, 68-69
SchmeIler, Johann Andreas: on
dialects, 131; and discursive com-
munity, 136-37; on historiciza-
tion of language, 132-34; on
nationhood, south German lin-
guistic, 115, 130, 142-43; politi-
cal views, 130, 131-32, 136,
142, 150; and spoken word,
131-32
 INDEX
Schmidt, Isaac Jacob, 88, 91-93
Schmidt, Johannes, 231, 232
Schneckenburger, Max, 146
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 261
Schott, Wilhelm, 93-94
Schottelius, Justus Georg, 13, 14
Schraeder, Eberhard, 100
Schulpforta, 178, 259
Science of Language (Max Muller),
233
Science of Thought (Max Muller), 217
Scientific Revolution, 8
Search for a New Theory of the Human
Representational Faculty (Rein-
hold), 50
Sechehaye, Albert, 272
semiotics, 27-29, 33,41,61,270,
281
Semitic languages, 1,2, 152, 184,
189,194,257; historicized, 67,
95-101,235; Indo-European
languages, in relation to, 17, 71,
83,95-96,102-12,209,220,
225-26; Renan on, 223, 224,
225-27
Sheehan, Jonathan, 9
Shem, 12, 67
signs, language as system ot~ 61, 149,
164, 176,276; and agency of
speaker, 16, 116,270,273,
278-79, 289; and expressive the-
ory of language, 6, 42; and rep-
resentation, 8, 21, 46; and
thought, 27-30, 32,52,175
Sinology, 92-94
Sinti and Roma, 209
Skinner, Quentin, 8
Slavic languages, 70, 229
Smith, George, 100
Societe asiatique de Paris, 222
Societe linguistique de Paris, 275
soul, in relation to language, 40-45,
253-56,258,268
sound change, 130, 133, 152,
236-38,279, 325n42
Spain, 24, 149
416
speakers, role in language, 11, 12,25,
42,277; asserted, 8, 27, 235,
272-73, 279-80, 283; dismissed,
19,151,232-34,269-70,277,
279,292; and psychology,
236-39,242-43,275
speech and speech acts, 8, 10, II,
131,237,277
Sprachwissenschaft. See linguistics
St. Petersburg, 65, 84, 90, 92, 94
Stadler, Franz Josef~ 132
Starn, James, 51
Stammbaum. See family tree
standardization oflanguage, 5, 8, 13;
New High German, 14, U8,
127,128,136,141,249
Stein, Karl vom, 166
Steinthal, Heymann, 60, 243,
244-46, 247-48, 275; on auton-
omy oflanguage, 253, 257-58;
on Humboldt, 251-53; on lan-
guage and nationhood, 256-57;
on language and thought,
251-58; on language and the
unconscious, 253-56, 280; and
Nietzsche, 259, 260, 263; and
psychology, 251-58
Stocker, Alfred, 248
Stocking, George, 216
Strasbourg, University of, 156
Strauss, David Friedrich, 221
structuralism, 5, 242, 270, 277,
281-82,283-84,285,290-92
structuralist linguistics, 176,239,
244,269,277,290-91
subjectivity and the subject,S, 6, 12,
30; language and the construc-
tion of, 43, 58, 292-94; linguis-
tic critique of, 19-21,47,63,
242,243,258,282,290;~
structuralism, 270, 277, 282,
291-92
SuBmilch, Johann Peter, 41, 42
Sumerian language, 101
Susu language, 257
Swabian dialect, 128, 132
 INDEX
Swedish language, 128, 135, 150 Trautmann, Thomas, 17,67,215
Symbolism and Mythology of the Treatise 01'1 the Grammar of New Tes-
Ancient Peoples (Creuzer), 177 tament Greek (Winer), 195
synchronic linguistics. See linguistics: Treatise on the Mechanical Formation
synchronic of Language (Brosse), 205
Synoptic Gospels: Their Origin and Trubetzkoy, Nikolai, 286
Historical Character (Hotz- Turanian languages, 213, 216
mann),99 Turkish language, 37, 70, 88, 91,
Syria and Syrian language, 70, 107 221-22,231,257
Syriac language, 9, 10, 81, 96, 100, Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 267
221 Tychsen, Thomas Christian, 90, 96
typology of languages. See classifica-
Tacitus, 114, 202, 209 tion of language
Tartar language, 94 Tyrol, 132, 142
Taylor, Charles, 20, 43
Taylor, Talbot J., 27 Uighurs,91
Thai language, 93 Umlaut. See vowel modifications
theology: and autonomous language, unification, German, 15, 18, 157,
21,63; and philology as disci- 243,244,258
pline, 3,9,61,67, 103-4,229, United States of America, 147,272,
259. See also biblical criticism 283,285
Theory of Language (Bernhardi), 53, university as institution, 14, 15, 137,
56 140, 180,285; and philology, 7,
Thiersch, Friedrich, 105, 162, 62, 166
177-82,185,190; Bavarian Urbild, 161, 168
state, relationship to, 178, 181; Urform,4, 11, 108,231
on Greek origins, 177-79, 182; Urheimat, 66, 74, 77, 84, 88, 220,
travels to Greect:, 181-82, 337 286. See also Indo-European
Third Reich, 17, 18,285,286,288, homeland
340n6 Urmythus, 120
Thirty Years War, 13,67 Ursprache, 10,51,74,85, Ill, 122,
Thomasius, Christian, 14 262, 298n13; and Germanic lan-
Thorpe, Benjamin, 213 guages, 120, 145,250; and
Thrace, 148, 149 Indo-European languages, 3, 77,
Tibet and Tibetan language, 37,91, 210,231; national tongues as,
92,254 14,72,83,95, 161
Tieck, Ludwig, 120 UrverwandtschaJt, 220. See also Indo-
Tieck, Sophie, 53 European languages: Semitic lan-
Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 230 guages, in relation to
Toews, John E., 10, 12, 121, 126, Urvolk, 113-16, 127, 128, 137,216,
146,148,151 250
Tooke, Horne, 72 Uvarov, Sergei, 89
Toury, Jacob, 102
Townson, Michael,S Vai language, 257
transparency oflanguage, 5, 9, 19, Venice, 142
25,26,295 vernacular, 5, 8, 13-14, 127, 128,

417
 INDEX

131-36,237 270-71,277,278
Verner, Karl, 236, 271 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 54
Viehmann, Katerina, 139 Wilhelm I, kaiser of Germany, 98,
Vienna, 152, 153,229 154
Vietnamese language, 93 Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany, 100,
Virchow, Rudolf, 219, 220 157
Vogt, Carl, 210 Wilhelmine Germany, 17, 18,
Volkerpsychologie, 243, 244, 246-47, 249-51,289
275 Wilkens, Charles, 80
Volksgeist, 25, 40, 244, 246, 285, Wilkens, John, 8
289; language, detached from, Williamson, George S., 4,177,184
236,238,242,284 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 77,
Volkskunde, 285, 287. See also folk/ore 165, 184
and folkJife Windisch, Ernst, 191
Volney Prize, 105,223,254 Windischmann, Karl Josias, 209
Vormiirz, 4, 140, 157 Winer, Georg Benedikt, 195
Vossler, Karl, 287 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5,290
vowel modifications, 122, 123-24, Wolf, Friedrich August, 118, 162,
134,271,325n41 163-64, 173; and philology,
institutionalization of, 7, 159,
Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 120 166,176; students uf, 53, 162,
Wagner, Richard, 18,210,262 172
Walhalla, 143 Wolff, Christian, 37
Wallerstein, Fanny, 105 words and things, relationship
War of Independence. See Greece: between, 126, 148. See also refer-
War of Independence entiality of language
Wars of Liberation, 117, 128, 131, World War I, 9, 283, 285,286,288,
166 290
Wartburg Festival, 137 Wortphilologen. See classical studies:
Weber, Albrecht, 191,276 "realists" and "verbalists"
Weigand, Friedrich Ludwig Karl, 152 Wallner, Franz, 95
We iller, Cajetan, 130 Wundt, Wilhelm, 244, 271
Weimar Republic, 3, 285
Weisberger, Leo, 289 Yiddish, 102-3, 195,249,288
Weisse, Hermann, 99 Young, Thomas, 200
Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb, 162, 16~, Ypsilanti, Alexander, 180
190,191,229
Wellshausen, Julius, 99-100, 195 Zeitschrift fur Viilkerpsychologie und
Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de, Sprachwissenschaft, 244, 246
97 Zend-AJ7t:sta, 201, 222, 223
Whitney, William Dwight, 272-73, Zoroastrian books and Zoroastrian-
283; critique of German philol- ism, 72,105,201,223
ogy, 235, 276; and Saussure,

418